More Signs of the Times

There is a backlog of photos of signs in my files. Add to that a lack of inspiration and sheer cussed laziness and it all points to "It's time to stick a bunch of photos on the blog and caption them and call it a day." Here goes.

"So don't bring us any of that stinkin' silver."

Well, at least it's truth in advertising.

Employees get to have all the fun.

Darn. I thought illegal dumping might be OK here.

 

Shoot. That must be why traffic is so darn slow.

Oh, good! I can bring my Komodo dragon.

Synchronicity.

 

C'mon in, the water's great!

Rain, More Rain, Wet Squirrels and Giant Mushrooms

The sun did not shine. 
It was too wet to play. 
So we sat in the house. 
All that cold, cold, wet day.
             --Dr. Seuss, "The Cat in the Hat"

It actually would have been nice to sit in the house all the cold, cold, wet day that was yesterday, November 19, 2012. But there were appointments to meet, errands to run, and school to attend. So the only ones who stayed warm and cozy inside were the cats.
 
November 19 is statistically the day most likely to be rainy in Seattle; it has rained on this date 89 times in the past 120 years (including this year's gulley washer). Yesterday, however, set a new record for the date. The 50-year-old record of 1.23 inches was eclipsed by noon and by day's end measured 2.16 inches. Lots more fell in coastal areas and on the peninsula and down in Oregon, and winds gusted up to speeds over 100 miles per hour in some places. 

Basements flooded. Trees and even trailer trucks were toppled. Roofs blew away, avenues turned into rivers, train tracks were closed. Hillsides turned into hill slides, losing their moorings and slipping down slopes and over roads. Rivers crested. In some places, migrating salmon swam across waterlogged streets.

Every year, torrential rains pummel the region in November, and yet, every year, the fury and amount of it takes us by surprise.

For our household, the rain was mostly just an inconvenience and fortunately not a catastrophe. A pause in the daily rush meant savoring a cup of coffee while flipping through recipe books at the dining room table, listening to the rain crash on the window and run down in sheets while the birch tree's supple branches swept north with the wind. 

A walk with the dog during a half-hour of clear skies meant strolling along sidewalks dappled with fallen Japanese maple leaves pressed against the pavement like hands. 

Along the way we encountered a very damp, chilly squirrel using his tail as an umbrella. 
 
We also discovered a patch of mushrooms that look as if they came straight out of the pages of a children's book:

November 19 must be the date when Nature tots up all those other days of the year on which children chanted "Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day" and pours out the reservoir.

 

Phinney Ridge Deer: Bambi and Faline Scamper in Seattle

Eagle dining on pigeon on utility pole across from my house

We're blessed with an abundance of wildlife in Seattle. Orcas swim through Puget Sound, river otters cavort in West Seattle, and Pacific giant octopi lurk offshore. Ospreys nest in Ballard, peregrines on downtown buildings, and bald eagles fly over my neighborhood every day. My feeders are visited by a variety of songbirds, who keep their eyes peeled for the local Cooper's hawk. Salmon are currently thrashing their way upstream in Carkeek Park.

(And there are also squirrels, raccoons, opossums, coyotes, and the odd fox, though these poor critters rarely stir anyone to wax on rapturously about them.)

Even so, it's a bit of a surprise when larger varieties of wildlife show up on city streets. People still talk about "Urban Phantom," the black bear that appeared in Ballard in 2009 and proceeded to take a northeastern trek through Seattle neighborhoods until it vanished somewhere past Shoreline. And the cougar that prowled Discovery Park in 2009, forcing closure of that park until the animal was captured, then released in the Cascade Mountain foothills.

I'm extremely dismayed that I wasn't out  walking the dog on a recent morning when the latest Large Ungulate sighting occurred: two blacktail deer, a buck and a doe, nonchalantly nibbling plants in backyards mere blocks from my home in my close-packed, car-filled urban neighborhood. (My friend R., however, was fortunately up and about and armed with a cell phone, and she kindly loaned me her images.)

The deer trotted through our neighborhood and made their way east to the University District and Wedgewood, mightily surprising people in those areas.

 

USFWS photo

I haven't found any stories about them since. There are, however, stories from a few years ago about deer living in a greenbelt in the Capitol Hill neighborhood southeast of us, which these two deer could easily access via bridge or by swimming across Portage Bay (deer are strong swimmers).
 
Blacktail deer (a subspecies of mule deer) are regular visitors to yards in suburban and rural Washington areas. Mule deer and blacktail deer are two of the five types of deer native to North America; the others are the white-tailed deer, the elk or wapiti, and the caribou. (I haven't seen white-tails in the area, but a herd of elk live at the local zoo just up the hill, and currently the local nursery has a pair of the caribou's cousin, reindeer, in residence for the Christmas season.)

Blacktails were frequent visitors to my parents' home on Bainbridge Island--so much so that they started making my mom grit her teeth and mutter when they ambled across their yard.

That's because the deer devoured her lilies, browsed leaves and twigs off saplings, and gobbled up pansies. One morning, she went outside to admire the daisies planted in a barrel on the lower deck, only to find that the deer had neatly trimmed all the petals off of them, leaving just the round, yellow disks teetering on spindly stalks.

 Any bitterness, however, usually evaporated and all was forgiven when the fawns showed up in spring.

10 Things I Buy Too Much Of

Zoowoology 101

I have craft supplies. I have a crafting group. I have craft books and cravings to craft.

What I don't have is time to craft. Which means I don't actually produce any crafts. In fact, I am starting to think that my craft is the collecting of craft supplies.

This abundance of unused materials, depending on the day, sometimes seems to represent Hope (oh, the possibilities! The things I'll create! Just wait!) or Defeat (who am I kidding? I'll never do any of this stuff) or Regret (I've wasted so much money...I'm such an idiot...I never accomplish anything). Perhaps I can get a grant for it as some sort of art installation about evoking raw emotions.

But this past spring I actually did produce something. Not much, but something, and he's kind of cute. It seemed appropriate for him to make his debut on Election Day, being a donkey and all.

He's a product of needle felting, which for those of you who haven't sat around stabbing an extremely sharp and painful needle into your fingertips involves repeatedly stabbing an extremely sharp and painful needle into streamers of unspun wool, or roving, in order to weave, or felt, the fibers together (while avoiding stabbing your fingertips).

Donkey's got an armature of chenille stems (fancy pipe-cleaners), around which I wrapped the roving as I felted. He's therefore poseable, should he wish to strike a dramatic stance or lie down for a nap.

Unfortunately I broke two felting needles making him, since I'm still learning to avoid stabbing the wire of the chenille stems as well as my fingers, so he won't make any friends (or rather, I won't be making him any friends) til I get some new needles.

Despite my low productivity in the craft arena, I really enjoy needle felting. I don't get much time to do cartooning these days; when I'm with my craft group, however, and take up the felting needle and wool, I find that the critters I make resemble the ones I draw. 
Molding animals out of Sculpey never produced the results I wanted, but a felting needle somehow draws the wool fibers out and forms them in the same way a pencil pulls a character together out of lines of graphite.


For some really fun examples of needle-felted animals, check out my friend Eliel Fionn's "Felties" here (her characters also look just like the ones she draws!) as well as fiber artist and author Laurie Sharp's works. My friend Ruth Hendry is a fiber artist who felts, too--her beautiful creations include rugs, scarves, and wall hangings and can be seen here.

In the meantime, anybody interested in some paints, stamp pads, beads, sequins, fabric scraps, artificial flowers, Popsicle sticks...? No?

Boo to You, Too

Jack o' lantern from 2010 .

Very behind on Halloween this year.

Scrambled to assemble small bowl of candy for the lone trick-or-treater who might show up.

Pumpkins are sitting on the front steps, uncarved.

No time to make barmbrack, the traditional Irish yeasted raisin-studded bread that's also stippled with fortune-telling treats such as a silver coin and a ring.

No time to make the Halloween costume I'd thought up this time last year but did nothing about for the next 364 days.

No decorations. Not like in past years, when even the cats got into the spirit of things.

We did manage to stop at a pumpkin farm, though instead of scouring vast fields for Just the Right Pumpkin, indulging in hot apple cider, and then paying a buck to stuff a small pumpkin into a Pumpkin Cannon and send it flying hundreds of yards across a field and into a marsh, we spent just 10 minutes looking among a selection near the parking lot.

We used to pour a lot more energy into Halloween: there was all the excitement of helping our daughter put together a costume and showing up at the elementary school Halloween parade (I am astonished, but delighted, that the school was able to continue this tradition, as a hurricane of objections with winds blowing from vastly different ideological directions have caused it to be abolished in many places).

And twice we turned the basement into a haunted house, complete with a maze of paths, flickering lights, spooky noises, a bubbling cauldron, dry ice fog, and once, a computerized brain that answered kids' questions (the brain behind the creepy image being my brother's creative mind).


Oh well. My daughter has at least gotten into the Halloween spirit and went to school dressed as a cowgirl, wearing a white hat bordered with silver sequins. And Mother Nature has not stinted on seasonal decor.

A Halloween display of gourds at local supermarket

Local crows

Eerie moonlight

Big fat autumn garden spiders

Golden Years with Golden Books

I used to love studying the endpapers of Golden Books!

Just about every American alive nowadays must be familiar with Little Golden Books, either because they grew up reading them or bought them for their own kids, grandchildren,  nieces, and nephews. The heck with Proust's madeleines; these nearly-square, sturdy books can, at a glance, take me back not just to some misty notion of my childhood but directly to the exact spot where I sat (or lay on my back, or hung upside-down off the edge of the sofa) while paging through them.

I hadn't given Golden Books a lot of thought in recent years, not since sharing some of them with my daughter. Our motley collection has spent the past decade squashed into a bookshelf with other picture books. But a few weeks ago I attended a wonderful presentation about Golden Books by the series' current editor, Diane Muldrow, and was inspired to pull out our books.

Little Golden Books first rolled off the presses in 1942. I encountered them in the 1960s. All my copies from  that time ended up at the Long Acres Elementary School white-elephant sale sometime in the 1970s, but I was able to snag a few of my favorite old titles when scouring yard sales and thrift shops for used copies.

One of my all-time favorites was We Like Kindergarten, by Clara Cassidy and illustrated by Eloise Wilkin.

I have a very vivid memory of being about two years old and weeping in the hallway of Long Acres because my older brother was starting kindergarten, and there was a batch of big toy animals in that magical room that I could see from the door and longed to play with. I remember a very tall, red-headed teacher crouching down and comforting me, saying, "In just a few years you'll be in kindergarten!" (She was not only correct in this prediction, but also would turn out to be my kindergarten teacher.)  

We Like Kindergarten was my consolation prize that day. I used to like the page with the girl on the swing because I had a gray  earwarmer-hat that tied under the chin just like hers, knitted by my Aunt Leona, and so I thought somehow we were related.

Another favorite was The Three Bears, illustrated by Feodor Rojankovsky. This artist's animals are a lesson in how to combine actual animal anatomy with the whimsy and action of a story. Even when they're wearing clothes, his animals are scarcely civilized (this talent is on vivid display in the fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme books he illustrated). He was incredibly skilled at giving texture to his pictures; you just want to sink your fingers deeply into the fur of the bears.

But you wouldn't dare. Look at those eyes! As a kid I marveled at those beady little eyes, nothing more than white circles around small black dots. It was important that the dots were fully encircled by white; if they'd touched the eyes' edges, they'd immediately give the animal a more cheerful or human look.

And this angry bear was anything but cheerful or human. Don't ever mess with a grizzly's porridge, kids.

An equally fuzzy but less menacing bear romped through the pages of The Large and Growly Bear by Gertrude Crampton, illustrated by John P.  Miller. Miller used the same white-circle/black-dot technique for his bear's eyes, but only when he needed the bear to affect a blank, scared, or wondering expression. Just by making the pupils wider, or by moving them to shift the bear's gaze, he instantly made his boastful bruin a more friendly and hapless creature. I remember this fascinating me as a kid, that just this little tweak could change the whole look of a character and its story.

Like "Rojan," the artist Tenggren (who illustrated many Golden titles), depicted his predators with small pupils to give them an intense look. At right is his wonderful lion from The Saggy Baggy Elephant. For some reason I disliked the elephants in this book and sort of wanted the lion to be able to eat Sooki, the elephant baby. Poor lion, he looked so hungry, and Sooki was so plump.

 I certainly didn't want the lion to eat any of the canines features in Dogs, illustrated by Tibor Gergely, so it was a good thing that title was devoid of ravenous large feline predators. Which made sense, as this was a nonfiction book.

The Little Golden Books line included a lot of  nonfiction content, often presented within a storybook context but sometimes as straight nonfiction (there were books about postal workers, firefighting, cars, trains, dinosaurs, and animal migration, for example).  

Dogs was told in verse. When I opened up the book prior to writing this blog entry, one illustration in particular tugged me straight back to the kitchen in the house I grew up in. I remember standing there, book in hand, asking my mom why this dog had such a funny tail, and her explaining that the lady in the picture was just knitting with yarn that was the same color as the dog.

Flipping through the Golden Books we have on hand inspired me to take out from the library some of the nonfiction books suggested by Ms. Muldrow, such as a history of children's book publishing in America (Minders of Make-Believe by Leonard Marcus) and a history of Golden Books in particular (Golden Legacy, also by Marcus).

Though the little 25-cent Golden books were viewed with disdain by booksellers and librarians back in the 1940s and 1950s, they were eagerly snapped up by cost-conscious parents and just as eagerly embraced by children.

And some of children's literature's most esteemed authors and illustrators have worked on this series over the decades. Little Golden Book creators include such luminaries as Margaret Wise Brown, Charlotte Zolotow, Richard Scarry, James Marshall, Alice and Martin Provensen, Trina Schart Hyman,  Joan Walsh Anglund, and Garth Williams. Williams is renowned for illustrating such books as Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, the "Little House" books, The Rabbits' Wedding, Bedtime for Francis, and The Cricket in Times Square, among many others. His Little Golden Book My First Counting Book entranced me when I was little--I wanted to cuddle the kittens, and I wanted to taste those candy-colored orbs with numbers on them.

The more I researched Little Golden Books, the more I discovered that other books I'd loved as a child were published by Western Publishing/Golden Press. They published big nonfiction books (I still have and cherish my Golden Book of Dinosaurs), small, chunky "big little books" (my favorites were the Little Tiger books and The Adventures of Henry Rabbit), and collections such as The Golden Treasury of Poetry. The latter is one of the most beloved books on my shelves--I pored over it as a kid, plus my mom gave it to me and inscribed my  name on the flyleaf. It's where I first encountered the beautiful writing of Elizabeth Bishop and her poem The Fish, which later became the basis of the first paper I wrote in college as an English major. (No, you will not have heard of that illustrious paper.)

I love "It's a Small World Connections" (and boy, does Little Golden Books have one: the effervescent Mary Blair, who illustrated Ruth Krauss's I Can Fly, went on to design the "It's a Small World" ride at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, a ride I recall vividly because I sat stone-still in the little boat, terrified that it would tip over).

My "It's a Small World" connection today occurred while paging through the Little Golden Book Horses when I noticed it was written by one Blanche Chenery Perrin.

Chenery? Any relation to Penny Chenery, famous as the owner of super-racehorse Secretariat and his stablemate Riva Ridge?

Oh, we do love the Internet. A few minutes' Googling revealed that Ms. Perrin's brother was Christopher Chenery, owner of Meadow Stable, which bred Secretariat. Perrin also wrote non-Golden books about horses and horse racing. Some of which were illustrated by famous equine artist Sam Savitt. Whom I spoke to on the phone once when I was a lowly editorial assistant at Dodd, Mead back in the day.

Little books, small world!