Happily, I do have things to write about tonight. On Saturday a friend and I went on a native plant walk at Washington Park, a beautiful and unknown park (to me) near the ferry dock in Anacortes. The park is some 220 acres in size, was clear cut about a century ago and then gifted to the city by the logger baron who stripped it. So, there are some big second growth trees and several different habitat types there. Part of the park is wet and shady and part is on an exposed rocky bluff above the Sound. I learned several wildflowers and other native plants I had not known before, which is always fun. Plus I saw common blue camas and death camas growing side by side, which was a exciting.

On the dry side of the bluffs grows Rocky Mountain juniper, found in few places this far west of the Rocky Mountains. And there were lots of wonderful twisted madrones with their polished naked wood exposed, although they remain evergreen throughout the year.

I was especially taken with the tiny wildflowers whose names I learned just two days ago. As I think about my fascination with small plants and creatures, I reflect on my attention to detail (sometimes to a fault) and the fact that I’m much less adept at seeing the whole. Frequently I feel despair over my inability to comprehend or identify all the pieces, especially when people around me seem to do it so effortlessly. It makes me feel stupid sometimes that I didn’t take one piece of the whole into account.

On the other hand I know I’m fascinated with little plants and bugs because I can get up close and feel more connected to them. When it comes to abstract details, I focus on those because I can feel more control and ability to accomplish small detailed tasks. I do think it would be useful for me to practice seeing the big picture more. It is something I can do, but I have to really concentrate and bend my mind to the task.

With those musings, here are a bunch of photos I took on the plant walk for your enjoyment.

Common Blue Camas & Death Camas

Death camas

 Some Indian tribes harvested camas bulbs to eat, but must have discovered early on that death camas were, as their name implies, deadly. The bulbs of the two plants look alike, but the difference between them is unmistakable while they’re blooming. To ensure they didn’t dig death camas by mistake, they weeded out death camas when there were just a few or marked safe plots from which to harvest during the bloom season.

Fairy slipper orchid

Fawn lillies

Shooting stars growing in poor soil near tidal rocks

Shooting star growing in little soil in rocky crevice

Shooting stars up close

Can you tell I was enchanted with these little beauties? There were so many of them and they grew best where soil was thin and poor. How amazing that such loveliness prefers marginal conditions.

Field chickweed - so delicate

Miner's lettuce

This can be eaten as a salad green. We saw another type called Siberian miner’s lettuce, which is also edible. This particular plant is such a vibrant green and delightful shape. There’s a blog I just found out about today called “Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager”. The author wrote about miner’s lettuce about a month ago. Speaking of foraging, last week I picked a bunch of nettle tops and made them into a pureed nettle and rice soup, nettle pesto and dried some for tea. We ate up the last of those goodies for dinner this evening.

Rattlesnake plantain - amazing leaf pattern

Reindeer lichen (white) & pod fern (green)

Sea blush encircled by reindeer lichen

Small-flowered blue-eyed Mary

Sea blush & blue-eyed Mary - tiny plants

Yellow monkey flower

These are flowers I feel some sort of kinship with because of fond memories of my dad teaching himself plant identification. I think he saw a bunch of these in the Wallowas of Oregon and pointed them out to the others in our family, but I may be mistaken. Whatever the reality, that location and the flower are classified together in my memory. He may also have been identifying pink monkey flowers, not yellow; in any case, monkey flowers have a distinctive shape.

Precise nest holes of different sizes in a snag

View of San Juans from Washington Park bluffs

Rocky Mountain juniper - there is green at ends of branches

Madrone (foreground) & Rocky Mountain juniper

On the way home we stopped off at the Seattle Conservation Corps at Sandpoint to pick up two free bags of Cedar Grove compost. I will use the bags to amend my two little vegetable garden plots, which I still haven’t planted. I really need to buy some seeds and get them in the ground this weekend.

The trouble is my weekend is pretty insane. Tomorrow much of the day I will be on a native plant walk with a friend near Anacortes. I’ll be getting up bright and early to drive up there and will get back mid-afternoon. I’m taking my camera, my binoculars and plant book and hope to have some pictures to put on the blog tomorrow. On Sunday I’m going to a cohousing information event downtown to represent Clearwater Commons and after that up to Bothell for a meeting to work on upgrading content for the school’s web site.

I did start writing down tasks and events today in four categories: home, Clearwater School, Commons and Bad Alien. Once I complete that I hope I can figure out how things should be prioritized–and come up with a realistic plan for getting things done. Learning to juggle is a valuable skill. It’s always been hard for me to work on something and quit before it’s at some level of resolution or completion. I think I need to get better at it. Luckily, I have a good model in my husband.

The three of us walked into Ballard on an errand this afternoon and on the way home stopped off at a new little cafe we’d been eyeing and wanting to try out. We got some chai and hot chocolate, but Cafe Cuzco is much more than that. It is owned by Peruvians and has a limited menu of Peruvian food, which we’ll have to try out sometime. It’s a great little place and has been open since January. I hope they succeed. We also noticed that the fountain in the park in downtown Ballard was running, so we had to stop there and relax a little.

Before ending, I have to pass along a link to an amazing video, which is almost entirely CG. It’s stunningly beautiful and skillful work and a lovely meditation on art. It’s called The Third & The Seventh. It’s a little over 12 minutes long. Do watch it in full screen and HD. There’s a link to getting the HD version under the video window.

An older student and I did some more creek monitoring, identifying and writing down the native and non-native plants in a particular area. We did our best to identify a native willow and decided it was either a Scouler’s or Sitka willow, leaning toward the Sitka. The two species are very similar to each other, so we weren’t completely certain. But just now as I found the links for the two willows, a plant ID site from Virginia Tech gave me the answer. We saw both willows today and now I know the difference between them. The Sitka willow’s leaves are very shiny green on top and the leaves of the Scouler’s willow are matte green. Hooray! We also found  fringecup, a native groundcover in the saxifrage family.

The smells in the air were delicious today. This morning when I went walking the perfume of the many blooming trees permeated the air, so that I felt absolutely transported by the scent. This afternoon when we were identifying plants, the buds of the cottonwood were giving off their exotic balsam scent. It’s amazing how early everything is this year. Lilacs and dogwood are already blooming. They don’t normally bloom until May. The normally slow unfolding of spring into summer maturity is too fast for me this year. I love being able to savor each new group of blooming trees and plants, but this year they’re all piling on top of each other. Sigh.

Tonight I really loved our choir rehearsal. Most of the music is feeling pretty famliar now, so we are working on perfecting and bringing more dynamics to the songs. It’s always gratifying to get through the work of learning all the different notes and rhythms so we can really work on a song as a whole piece.

Tomorrow I’m going to strategize and organize my many commitments and tasks and find ways to work through them so I don’t feel so overwhelmed. I’m hoping a way through will become more clear.

With the exception of a few days of low energy fighting and thankfully not succumbing to whatever virus is going around, I had a pretty good break. I was able to really take my mind away from school stuff, to the point that returning yesterday I felt like I’d been gone a long time. I don’t allow myself to do that often and it felt good.

I’m not going to recap much of the “lost” week, mostly because so much of it has faded from my memory already. It’s disconcerting and sometimes dismaying that events that feel so sharp and clear right afterward often fade so quickly. It’s difficult to even remember my feeling state around any particular experience. I wish I could bottle the totality of a wonderful  experience  and bring it out again to experience just as vividly again and again. Of course, that would be cheating and would discourage me from seeking out and savoring new things–from living, really.

Perhaps the longing for past good times feels especially strong right now because I’m feeling somewhat overwhelmed by all the things that I need to do–at school, at home, for the Commons and Bad Alien. At the same time, I need to actively pursue additional employment, especially during the summer months to contribute more to our family’s income. I feel hopeful I’ll make some serious inroads on my to-do list everytime there’s a bit of unscheduled time on my calendar, but my hopes are always dashed. Right now it feels like I’m getting more and more behind, rather than making progress. It takes most of my time just to do the things that have to be done on a daily basis, and I don’t know how I’m going to make more time.

This month and next are insanely busy (which seems to be the case every year), with lots of meetings and events leaving me little free time to get other things done, not to mention carving out even a little time for my own pleasure and relaxation. Needless to say I’m steeling myself for the busyness and gritting my teeth to just get through the next few weeks.

Just wanted to say I’m still alive and will start posting regularly tomorrow.

I don’t know whether I’ll have anything to blog about tomorrow, but if not I won’t bother to post anything at all. Perhaps there won’t be much that’s substantive until next week. Stay tuned.

I’ll post more tomorrow.

Earlier today Bob and I worked on some preliminaries in preparation for completing our tax return. Always an odious task, but we made some progress.

The Bad Alien production meeting was good this morning, with lots of  planning around the short, draft titled “Dragonslayer”. It’s fun to see that project get back on track again. It will be a really good piece, in my opinion.

Happy Easter everyone!

I had a relaxed day today. I spent some of the morning and then some time later in a coffee shop trying to read substantial portions of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Jungle City, before it’s due back at the library on Monday. This is the third time I’ve checked it out with long periods in between, thanks to its popularity with other readers. I’m determined to finish it this time, because it really is a fascinating read.

I also arranged to take our Toyota pickup in for service next Tuesday, because something is seriously wrong with the clutch. Bob was barely able to drive it home yesterday. I was able to arrange for a table to exhibit Clearwater Commons materials later this month at the Spring Garden Fairat UW-Bothell. I did some school work by adding information about Clearwater’s summer program to the web site, and sent a few emails out to friends with links to articles or information I thought they’d find useful.

I put together a tasty dinner of New Orleans black-eyed peas and rice in my usual plodding, nonefficient way, started some laundry and then watched more of Ken Burns’s multi-DVD film, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. That’s another item that has to go back to the library on Monday, so I’m racing against time on that too. I doubt I’ll finish it and will have to put it on hold again and wait my turn for many weeks. Oh well. It’s an okay film so far, although it has Burns’s typical, linear style, which can gets tiresome. I put up with the unimaginative documentary style just because I’m interested in the history itself.

All in all, a good day.

We looked around at the school’s property west of the bridge and near the creek and then at an eastern creek section of the Commons property. At school a lone trillium is blooming in a shaded area near the creek, and we noted alders and red osier dogwood leafing out. There’s a lot of Indian plum along the banks of the creek that is mostly done blooming. At the Commons, skunk cabbage and salmonberry are in bloom and I discovered patches of false lily-of-the-valley and native bleeding heart. There’s a wonderful island of dead wood debris with lots of native spirea unfurling soft chartreuse leaves.

Lantern-like skunk cabbage flowers

Salmonberry blossoms

False Lily-of-the-Valley

Native Bleeding Heart Foliage and Budding Flowers

While we were in this area we saw a song sparrow close by, a towhee in the thick brush and heard a chickadee calling. We startled another bird that was wading in a wet, mucky area, but it flew away so fast we didn’t get a good look at it.

Pacific Ninebark extending new growth over North Creek

Two other things I’ll quickly mention are a couple of articles I read today. One is a fascinating blog post by Clay Shirky (who wrote another article I mentioned in an earlier post), called “The Collapse of Complex Business Models.” It feels true to me and is both sobering and profound. The other article was published at The Daily Beast and is titled “Why Palin Drives Us All Mad.” It’s a thought-provoking look at why she incites such hysteria–of the hostile and contemptuous kind on the left and the adoring and devoted kind on the right. It made me look at my own reactions to her with more honesty.