For Sue’s retirement party a hat contest was held. Here are the entrants.
Over the Horizon
For Sue on the occasion of her retirement.
What lies in store for you,
For any of us,
in these uncertain times
When the world that we knew
is falling away.
We’re all taking leave from routine
Retiring from our usual pursuits
Adapting ourselves,
our behaviors,
our thinking,
to a stricken world
unseen in a century.
On this turbulent tide of change
Your little boat slips out of the workaday world
bobbing along with a motley fleet of vessels
As we navigate through the chop and fog
To a new world across the sea.
Get Your Hat On
As part of Sue’s upcoming virtual retirement party, she is hosting a hat making contest and asking people to submit a photo of their entry. While I’m usually not keen on costumes and dress up, I decided to go for the gold in submitting my Carmen Miranda inspired entry.
Hatch up or Hatch Down?
Arrrg! is intended to serve as an occasional outlet for your communal frustration and ranting. Today’s futile kvetching is about the state of toilet seats, particularly in our shared communal space, the Common House.
Unlike the doors on most public restrooms, ours lack a Vacant / Occupied indicator and are not equipped with automatic door closers. So, the state of the door is either ajar or often wide open, and usually with the toilet hatch in salute for inspection position.
The science of whether tis better to leave the hatch up or down is hardly definitive as the academic article Lifting the lid on toilet plume aerosol and the Brit Lab short below demonstrate.
In Feng Shui, wet spaces like bathrooms and laundry rooms are inherently problematic. Think mold, fungus, bacteria, and the like. As for toilet seats, Feng Shui practitioners generally recommend putting the hatch down, something about being a prosperity sink, where leaving it open is akin to flushing your wealth down the drain. I’m skeptical of this claim and think a simple poll or study of millionaires would likely show that they are no more or less inclined than the hoi polloi to leave the hatch down.
As for leaving the toilet seat up after enjoying the masculine privilege of peeing while standing, cohabitation with the fairer sex has firmly ingrained in me the moral rightness of always putting the seat down when I’m done. The lid, however, is another matter. When one considers the excess energy expended lifting the lid up and putting it back down over the course of a lifetime, for what seems little more than a matter of opinion or “energetic sensitivity”, a reasonable argument can be made to spare the next person from lifting what may be an unhygienic lid.
Despite the obvious convenience of leaving the hatch up at all times, I’ve become a firm believer in closing the lid when I’m finished with my business. To my eye it’s less unsightly and just “feels right”. When I see the lid up a voice in me says: “There be barbarians in these parts.”
This is not an upper case ARRRG! it’s more a hopeless sigh of an arrrg. Just one of those little things like our mismatched silverware and coffee cups. It rankles and ruffles like a slight disturbance of the force.
Iphoneography
As a teenager, my first experience in photography was shooting black and white film with my father’s medium format Hasselblad camera. These were, and are, great cameras, beloved by professionals, used by astronauts on the moon. Way too nice a camera for a duffer like me shooting morbid pictures of twisted trees and gravestones in the Lone Fir Cemetery. Later in youth I sprung for a Konica 35mm camera, with a decided preference for Fujichrome slide film. I regret that I was a lousy chronicler of life in my twenties, shooting artsy pictures of flowers and vegetables rather than the much more interesting subjects of my fellows living communally at the Still Meadow spiritual center for Emissaries of Divine Light in Oregon. Hey, it was the 70’s, so cut me some slack!
My first digital camera was an HP Photosmart 315 which, for a 2.1 megapixel point and shoot, was not a bad little pocket camera. I used that while living in Boulder, CO as well as on a trip to Yellowstone and Colorado with Sue and Brendan. I followed that up with a nifty Panasonic DMC-FZ7 that served me well in Puerto Vallarta with Sue’s parents.
My best ever camera is a Nikon D90. When I really need to do a serious shoot, this is the camera that I pull out. It’s the camera I use in tricky indoor light situations, when a bounce flash comes in handy. And, it doesn’t hurt to have a telephoto zoom lens at the ready. It’s a big boy camera.
But the camera that I use nearly all of the time now is the one on whatever my current iPhone is. Smartphone cameras are so good these days, particularly when shooting outdoors, that they are more than just good enough. They are less obtrusive, and can do a remarkably good job.
The beach photo at the head of this post is from my iPhone Xs. I don’t think my Nikon could balance the glare of the sun in the clouds with the dimmer light of people on the beach. The iPhone camera performs this high def resolution magic by shooting a series of frames, some underexposed, some over, and some “properly” exposed, and then instantly blends them together into a single image that captures the scene as I saw it at the time. Previously, you would do this with a tripod mount and manually set each exposure. Then, back at your computer you would use HDR software to make the final image. Much more work, much less fun. The other feature in play is “Panorama” mode, where you pan across the scene while the software stitches the separate frames into a single image. It’s pretty awesome.
I also shoot lots of brief video segments and use the IOS Photos app “Memories” feature to make those short video montages that I periodically post. I love how you can say so much in 60 seconds. The bottom line, it’s a really fun camera to use.
Giants in the Ground: Raven Rises
Another creature in the woods from my friend Sandra Brown Jensen.
Starlight Parade 2019
After the Cohousing conference last year we stayed for the Starlight Parade, another civic event nixed by the bug.
Alas, No Country Fair This Year
Usually this time of year Sue and I would be camping out at the Country Fair for a few days. Maybe next year.
Death Café
Death, the taboo conversation stopper, has been peeking out of the closet in recent years. Death Café’s have become increasingly popular and Portland has a particularly vibrant Death Café culture. The purpose of the Death Café movement is succinctly stated as ‘to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives’.
For now, I leave you with the short video below, but I hope to have Death Café become a regularly feature where meditations on death take place from time to time.
Your Privacy on The Cascadian Online
Google my name and the first three links are an obituary, a moribund Flickr account of mine and a Facebook page of my namesake dressing up as Captain Kirk. Clearly, I need a consult with an SEO strategist to enhance my online presence. Item six of the search results on my name link to this archive page, listing articles that I’ve posted to The Cascadian in the past few weeks. Which brings me to the point of this article. What we say here on The Cascadian is now rattling around in the bowels of The Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, and the legion of other search engines crawling the web.
There are good reasons why you may not wish your name and likeness to be exposed to search engines on the web. We want to honor your privacy, while making The Cascadian available to a wider audience than the handfuls of residents who might read it regularly. To this end, I’ve asked for time at our next HOA meeting for you to let us know of your concerns so that we can address our editorial policy accordingly.
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