Right now, I'm all agog (again - I've had it pinned to the wall for ages) about John Dawson's illustration for the Olympic National Park brochure. He's the guy who did all those beautiful stamp sets - Great Plains, Sonoran Desert - where you deface them by peeling off the (33 cents- haha! ok, well, actually, an 11-cent rise in 12 years isn't bad) prairie dog. I can't stop looking and looking at it - every single centimeter is packed with some specific animal or plant (look, there's even a freakin' MOUNTAIN BEAVER ... oh, no, wait, that's a mole ... OK, I will persist in my adamant belief that there is no such thing as a "mountain beaver"). The seamless mix of perspectives is amazing. I can't wave my hands in the air enough about this stuff.
 
 
(crossposted to G+)
I went to Barstow for Christmas and all I got was this lousy chenopod.

[this here is the link to the full Rainbow Basin album]
From 20111224 - Rainbow Basin


DID YOU KNOW. The whole thing is the Mojave Desert, not just the part on the map that says "Mojave Preserve". Also? Joshua trees come in economy packs of FORESTS beside the freeway on the way to Las Vegas when you have daylight, even when you are running late.

[this here is the link to the full Barstow-area album]
From 20111223a - barstow


DID YOU KNOW. Jodawi in a hole.

From 20111224 - Rainbow Basin


I think you can only comment on Google albums now if you have a G+ account. I'll consider changing back to Flickr.

Thimbleberries noted. Also-seens:

Clintonia uniflora (in flower), Disporum hookeri (in fruit), Maianthemum racemosum (in fruit ... though maybe stellatum?), Maianthemum dilatatum (in fruit, which I misidentified as Asarum caudatum), a probable Corallorhiza mertensiana or four, some likely Monotropas, Ribes sanguineum (in fruit -- blech), a Claytonia, Sambucus racemosa (in fruit -- I had no idea how much baneberries look like these, at first glance -- yeeps!), Oplopanax horridus in quantity, something that wasn't mitrewort or fringecup (I guess Saxifragaceae is another one for the gotta-sort-them-out pile), Lilium columbianum, vast quantities of vacciniums (in fruit, green), Aquilegia formosa, Spiraea splendens, some sort of hedge-nettle, some extremely purpurea Digitalis, and this:


From plant ID help


Clearly something azaleoid. But? LOOK at those hooked pistils! (Sorry, iphone only on this trip. Hence only the one necessary photo.)

Also, fishies! Plipping!

Remind me to brag on my Ribes lobbii from June.
Wim and LoRe star in
A Very Gorey Beach Vacation
Wim is the bee's knees. Still, 12 hours is a LONG time to be in a car together when you only meant to go to Sonja's birthday party on the Anacortes/Friday Harbor ferry. Instead of doing that, we spent 5 minutes too long in an antiques store in Mt. Vernon because I thought the ferry left 20 minutes later than it did. It was ... interesting trying to get there on time. After the excitement, we moped about on the tide flats with the crows and the algae.

I thought it was a good idea not to grab my camera when we left the ferry terminal and went to Washington Park. It's pretty. Go sometime. We waved the ferry further along its way.

Chekhov's Pie
You should know that Wim, intolerant of cows and their milk, has in self-defense turned to making pies. Or perhaps he makes pies for other reasons, but in any case, no butter in the crust. This is not significant to the plot. As the first act opens, there is a pie in the car. Appley pie, for a party. Now mine ours, alllll ours. But we thought we should go to Deception pass and do things first. Since we were sort of there already. So we did that. There is a tidal race, or two, and the greenest water, and wildflowers, and tourists. The beach has all the pebbles in all the colors.
From 20110326-misstheboat
It is a nifty place, but not a peaceful place.

In the second act, the pie is eaten. Here, the lack of butter is not revealed to play any role in the development of events: the pie, the pie. She is magnificent. At some point, hoping to cut and eat the pie rather than to watch it being photographed, Wim may have resorted to looming with menace.

After that, we drove to the bottom of Whidbey Island in the darkening deering hours and missed the Clinton ferry by five minutes. Oh, well, they come every half hour. Mostly. In the two++ hours between the penultimate and ultimate Saturday ferries, we resorted to decentish Mexifood and getting stopped by a cop as we lurched across the highway in our trenchcoats. Honest, officer, we were listening to the frogs.
Some stuff, and then some other stuff. But I forget most of it. HOWEVER! Check this out!

From beanwest 2011

It's really a foxglove kinda year in the garden. Also we finally have summer. Which means ALL the dogs ALL the time, in my ears, since no AC. Folks across the way have a new one, alone a lot. I figure we have a decent semichorus now, if we could just get them to work together.

I had some trips, which I will display presently. Sadly for y'all, the pictures primarily involve ill-focused greenery. SORry!
Still have a zillion pics to upload from this summer. Meanwhile, would like an ID and am too tired to try to track this down.

These were blooming early August at maybe 7000' elev south of Yellowstone NP, growing in sandy clay loam in company primarily with grasses. Scroph?

From 20100802 - Colorado

second life

Oct. 5th, 2010 01:38 am
When I'm not being a nerd, I'm being a zombie. Hey, you take your pizza and SAG credits where you can get them. Film and music video this weekend.

Last week was another zombie film in Eastern WA - production assistant, shooting at night. Hey, you take your beer and frostbite where you can get them.

From 20101002-doronofthedead


Full album:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mittel.beaq/20101002Doronofthedead?authkey=Gv1sRgCKbepYzZ6pmszgE#
Penstemon ID here has been nagging at me. Possibility: Penstemon whippleanus, white-flowered form.  How cool would that be? I think anything where you can say "[x] form" is pretty cool. 

Any opinions? More photos at the link under the pic.

From 20100729-colorado

http://picasaweb.google.com/mittel.beaq/20100729Colorado#5499484945918874162

I do have more photos from this trip, but want to do something flashy with them and haven't had the time.
A taster of the first day of the drive back.

20100801-colorado
That's 97% of a bottle of not-inexpensive cabernet down, and 97% of an iTunes install done. There must have been *something* in between.

Maybe the killing jar. I got some bugs, today. I kilt them, in the jar. For the class. Killing them was a lot less fun than catching them. BUT! I look forward to finding out what they are/were. They were mating, and they looked like flies only with overlapped wings and sucking beaks, and they had a dead fly clasped to them, and here is a pictures of a bugs: )

That is one sad fly and a couple'a happy ones. I did not asphyxiate this set.
I Elysia chlorotica.


(I have to move my lips a lot to get through that second link. Let's try the intro to kleptoplasty instead.)
From 20091127-sacramento(p)
Well, it was Garden Valley, actually, last Wednesday. The itch started on Sunday, just south of the Oregon border. I am now a welted mass of crusty ooze. Never think it's just a spider bite.

Partially compensated by a 2-hour layover at a rest stop with more amazing tiny mushrooms every time I turned around!

Woot.

daily dos

Nov. 2nd, 2009 09:48 pm
Friday I went out in the wind. I surveyed a house and made the dog bark, then knocked on the neighbor's door to visit, since they have games and soda pop.*

From LJ illo
I was working and costuming Saturday, so I didn't notice if it was nice out. Then I drank a lot and saw my sis and her entourage. There was a strange convergence of religious and Trek themes. A lot of sexy monks. One harlequin nun. A harleqWim. But Harley Quinn was otherwise dressed.

It always seems to me that at parties I wander away for a minute and then never see someone again. Given that I don't remember actually deciding to go to bed (though I vaguely remember the process), and that I was very, very sorry to wake, I suspect I had more conversation with a bottle than with anyone else.

Sunday was gorgeously beautifully gorgeous. Cold and sunny, and the mountain was full of snow. I was 90% human almost in time to enjoy it, but it suddenly got dark!

Today. A dog. A view. Mushrooms. A ghostly weirdness in my camera.


I forgot to carve my pumpkins. Disliking thanksgiving themes, if not the holiday, I hesitate. They await.


* On Friday, I also ran an errand at PetSmart and stopped to admire the blue parakeets. On one end of the rope perch, a cluster of birds slept and preened. On the other end, one bird had gone perch-mad, crowding and bonking the hapless fellow beside him until he drove the interloper off.

Then he hustled down to the crowd at the end, to finish the job. He reared. He strutted. He thrust. Alas that his nearest neighbor was fast asleep. Baffled, the cavalier scuttled to and fro, eyeballed the opposition, leaned waaaaaayyy back on one leg, stretching the other to delicately *poke* his foe awake; whereupon he would most certainly have finished him off if his original nemesis had not so provokingly reclaimed the other end of the rope.

The wakened bird yawned and returned to his nap.
From LJ illo



But the HVAC is out of control.

From LJ illo
We went to another mountain. We stole some rocks. I did not get any photos of the great rocks (first, the not-as-bad camera battery died, then the iphone got sad), but they are great. Columnar basalt and all.

We hollered at pikas and whistlepigs. Hey, they yelled first.

This detail of a Bierstadt was taken for the Hiking Boyfriend, Joe, who needs to be poked with far-away mountains from time to time:
From 20090901 - mountainbaker
Native Plants class field trip to Rainier. Obligatory snapshots. Everyone send me your data and we can do this in 3D!

closeup of false hellebore flowers
From 20090808-rainier field trip
Some people seen a grouse. I yelled a lot about seeing a pika. Usually I'm the one grumping about people yelling in the outoors as if they were talking over their TV sets. My turn! Excuse? Field trip, not hike.
In August THOUSANDS OF FROGS migrate up the Big Obsidian Flow at Newberry National  Volcanic Monument. Clearly we went at the wrong time of year. It was not nearly sweltering enough.

Here are some generally-badly-focused pictures for your enjoyment:

From 20090627-Newberry

A lot of driving driving, this trip. I almost hit an elk. It might have been a horse. 60MPH of brown legs by headlight. Yeah, we left Seattle a little late.

Here is someone else's alternate view of the obsidian flow.
I was pretty impressed; I foolishly suggested that John could leave the camera behind for once.

Photos don't do justice to this spew. The glass foam that would scrape off your face like it was cheese! The half-ton deathly scalpels! The power of pumice! Thousands of acres of it. Here is something else interesting, besides the trees growing directly from the rock: flies landing on a pumice boulder and sponging it with their spongy tongues.

Spong.

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