Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

alanro and Jeanne (WINOLJ) visited us over the weekend. We played a lot of Scrabble—four-player games feel rather different from two-player—and yesterday drove east to Olallie State Park and walked/hiked in the woods. (The path was bumpy with tree roots and had few flat places, but not much slope either.)

That bit of the Cascade foothills includes a narrow band of rainforest. I don't know whether we were technically in the rainforest, but it looked and felt a lot like the Hoh rainforest we visited in June, on the Olympic Peninsula, with the bonus of actually being damp. (It hadn't rained in a week or two before our June trip.) There were muddy spots on the path, and a light rain fell for part of the time we were there. I was impressed by the numbers and sizes of the ferns, and took a few photos of ferns growing out of the sides of tree trunks.

They left this morning, and this afternoon I did some of my weight-lifting and resistance exercises; the walk yesterday was good, and worked my quads quite a bit (1.5 miles, but keeping my balance on variously tilted surfaces is more work than a paved/smooth path, even a somewhat steep one).

Inspired by padparadscha's post about seeing one, I have uploaded three more photos of the fire rainbow (aka circumhorizontal arc) that I saw out the bus window last Saturday afternoon. My Flickr (not twitter, damn it) username is rosvicl. I did very minimal photo processing, mostly cropping the images a bit.

I just threw out a jacket that I'd put away last Spring, knowing it was badly ripped in ways that probably aren't fixable (a tear in the patterned fabric, exposing the layer of fabric that made it a mid-weight Spring/Fall jacket).

I'll miss it, but I'm sure I got my money's worth. I picked it up at a consignment shop several years back, while in Seattle for a week between Corflu and Potlatch; that was the year they were both in Seattle, on consecutive weekends. I stayed with alanro and shikzoid for the time between the cons, except for the side trip to Vancouver with marykaykare, akirlu, and libertango. My Vancouver aquarium shirt is still in good shape, but it was new when I bought it.