WHAT’S CHANGED

October 31, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

I read a meme the other day that claimed we could no more give up AI than an addict could give up meth. Ptht!

The world is changing. Already a generation is growing up in a country where the President ridiculing his political enemies is normal. We see daily name-calling in the news and the way so many of us were bullied on the playground is normalized among adults. Behavior that would have led my mother to express her disappointment and send me to my room is now acceptable. Among adults. Overt racism and all the other ugly -isms are allowed, even encouraged by some. Speaking out for poor and disadvantaged people is suspect. Apparently, the strategy of keeping our heads down in order to avoid the bully in the schoolyard has followed some of us into adulthood. I won’t name the boy who made grade school a misery for me, but we seem to have elected his doppelgänger president.

***I call them “the green meanies.” They’re the remains of fireworks—I don’t know what sort. You don’t want to find them by stepping on them barefoot.***

I made the relatively innocent comment that I’d never felt comfortable with payments made under the table. A reader chewed me out. Had I always reported my babysitting money? I babysat once, as I recall. I was rubbish at it. These comments were in response to a campaign promoting the use of cash—after all, if paying babysitters was done entirely with a digital system, the teen saving money for college would have been adding to her Social Security account from the age of 14. My grandmother would have had to add $5 to my account instead of slipping a bill into my birthday card. People working a second job under the table because their retirement income didn’t quite make ends meet would be paying taxes. Imagine the horror.

Or we could ensure an actual living wage, socialize medicine, make college free, and fund the IRS so wealthy people cheating on their taxes would be caught and the rest of us would be better off.

Anyway, yes, I’d miss all the advantages of cash payments listed in that Facebook post. The argument is a distraction, though. Like so much of what we are being taught by powerful people to distrust and hate, the point isn’t to make our lives better; the point is to make their lives richer.

It’s bigotry and anger that we need to disappear.

I already miss things that disappeared from my childhood. I miss thank-you notes—seriously. I hated writing them as a little girl, but I have two friends who still send thank you notes and each one about brings me to tears. I miss landlines. I don’t wear my cell phone, but I know plenty of people who freak out if they are separated from their phones for any length of time. I miss phone booths. I miss wandering off to places where no one knows where I am and they aren’t even worried about it. I miss calling the doctor’s office and speaking to the person at the from desk in order to make an appointment. The person at the dentist’s office calls me back… so far. I miss paper magazines since I gave them up for Pinterest and each costs what I hesitate to pay for a printed book. I miss holiday dinners and cards and the rare long distance call to the friend I couldn’t afford to talk to for more than three minutes. I miss closeness between grandchildren and grandparents since two of mine avoid me.I assume that’s my fault and not simply a generational divide and that make it worse.

I am tired of Zoom and my “trash” folder filled with vulgar emails clearly intended for a sick-minded person of the opposite sex. I am tired of hearing about people’s sex lives. My podiatrist’s input forms asked me about my gender identity and I wrote: why? Why does my foot doctor care? Pronouns are useful once in a while when I talk about someone who isn’t there, but what business is it of mine how you self-identify or what you do and to whom? Honestly. [If I wanted a personal relationship with my podiatrist, I would rather he know the title of my favorite novel or my favorite color, but he told me several times during my fifteen minute appointment that he “doesn’t care” what I do.] For my evening entertainment, I don’t want to watch a rape scene and I don”t need a candid sex scene. I know how it works. Like most American adult women, I’ve been harassed and at 74, and I want those abusers punished but I really do not want to know the details others’ ordinary experiences.

I don’t want to watch films entirely consumed by violence or battles or violent attacks on people. A cozy mystery that ends with the criminal identified works fine for me. A Japanese series, Midnight Diner, is back with a new season on Netflix. Quiet and tender. Just what the doctor failed to order.

BORN LUCKY

October 16, 2026October 20, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

***One of the best pieces of luck in my life is Gary. He’d say the same. Yes, I’m certain.***

In 1971, when I left DJ’s Sound City, the only job I’ve ever been laid off from, I applied for work at the University Book Store in Seattle. It was, at that time, the largest of its kind in the world—it offered a huge selection of trade books, half the basement given over to textbooks, and other departments serving students at the University of Washington. I wanted to work in the Art Department since I was a studio arts major, but because of my experience in a record store, I was placed in the Music Department, working for Jess Burton. It was an essential part of my education.

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ADHD

October 9, 2026October 10, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

I was inserviced about ADHD. I recognized the behavior in my family and students. It was always male students. I was told that was because it was nearly always the boys who had ADHD and were often on meds. I’d seen it in my life among those I love. My husband might wake at 2am, drink a cup of coffee or two, and be able to get back to sleep. Think about that. He drank coffee to manage his overactive head—the stimulant allowed him to focus. That’s what Ritalin does—it seems a sort of backwards response to find that a stimulant allows the mind to slow down. [The way that the appearance of being laid back by smoking dope is countered by the reality that blood pressure rises with use. Yes, really.]

This flying goose is one of four we first saw a little over a week ago. Two pairs, we thought, smaller than the Canada geese. Then just two. Those two fed in our neighbor’s garden—no one was home. Then we found the remains of what we think was one of them, and geese mate for life. Since then, the other seems to fly north and south along the shore. Back and forth several times a day.

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SMOKING GUN

August 14, 2026August 14, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 6 Comments

“Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em,” They told my dad when he was training in Arizona for WWII.

In January of 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States announced in print that tobacco smoke was dangerous to health. Cigarette caused lung cancer. The announcement was a political risk to the SG, and a blow to a valuable American industry, which had known of the danger for decades and kept that to itself. The warning was timed for a Saturday so that the stock market would have a couple of days before shivering, and to allow for Sunday newspapers to cover the story in detail. People read newspapers then.

The bull Roosevelt elk are sparring. The Roosevelt are the largest elk in the world, weighing up to 1200 pounds. Neither of these 4-point elk are likely to die or even suffer harm shoving one another across the sand. Twenty minutes after I took this photo, they were both grazing in a neighbor’s yard. It’s early in the season, their velvet is just dropping from their antlers, but in another month or so, local bull elk will not be safe to be around.

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MARRIED

August 12, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

Our 52nd anniversary is coming up in twelve days. We’re going out for an early dinner that night because I have to be home for a Zoom meeting of a nonprofit. That’s okay. We are nearly always together. He’ll probably go for a walk during my Board meeting, and return in time to watch a show and the next day we’ll drive back to the beach. We figured out long ago that no one else will make time special, that’s on us. We tried for a “special” vacation for our 50th, and when we discovered our favorite restaurant had closed and our favorite hotel had new owners, we laughed and drove home. We spent at least three anniversaries in the ER with my mom. Those special days are unreliable, I’d say. It’s my husband I rely on.

Every time.

Two old people who still love one another. Gary’s straining not to pull another face, and look! Our hair is the same color. I tease him because when his hair was as long as mine in the early 1970s, women used to cross the street to pet it. He needs a haircut.

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ODYSSEY and LITERACY

July 31, 2026August 1, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

We don’t know for certain who composed The Odyssey, which is generally and perhaps inaccurately ascribed to a single bard, Homer in the 8th century BCE. Most modern experts, including Emily Wilson in her otherwise excellent introduction to her recent translation, routinely comment that one person could not possibly have memorized the entire epic poem. Most assume one person could not have written those two book-length epic poems much less remember them. They suggest that both The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed over a period of time with adjustment and additions by several or many people.

Not necessarily so. The human capacity for memorization is astounding.

This vase from the British Museum (c. 480–470 BCE) was decorated during Athen’s classic age three centuries after the story of Odysseus was known and eight centuries after at least some of the events described may have occurred in ancient times.

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NICE

July 24, 2026August 6, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

They used to say, Nice guys finish last. Right about now, we need more than neutrality. The world could use a dose of niceness.

My brother said our mother was the epitome of “nice,” and that is true. Mom always tried to be nice and sometimes she went above and beyond to be kind to other people just because. She once followed a car that had dangerously cut her off and ended by holding the poor driver while they sobbed out their entire life tragedies on Mom’s shoulder. My husband Gary is like that too. Saturdays in the 1970s we walked through every pawn shop on First Avenue in Seattle looking at guitars. Homeless men would tell him their life story and he would hand them change and sometimes they cried too because someone cared enough to hear them out.

That is my model for decent behavior. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Where have I heard that before?

There’s a bald eagle in the snag near the top of this photo, but she’s often there in the higher branches. We suspect her favorite perch is rotting and that’s why she’s taken the lower branch. Anyway, that’s not the reason for this photo. At the bottom, this photo shows the drift of sand in front of a shallow cave we pass most every morning on our beach walks. It looks like kids piled that sand up more than three feet high, doesn’t it? But this is what the tide did a few days ago. There are four sandbars running along our shore, five if I count the one that came up this spring nearly to the green line—more sand than we have seen in 40 years or so. The dune grass that was introduced to Gearharrt a few lifetime ago, was also introduced here but has not thrived the way Siberian blackberries, montbrecia, and English ivy have.

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BUSY DAYS

June 19, 2026June 19, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

June is ridiculously busy, which is not something I can say about most months. Most months my busy is entirely self-inflicted. I read, sew, knit, run, post online. Scrub floors. Gary and I drive to Portland and home from Portland, we walk across the city or walk five miles north on the beach. [We did this recently. Once. Ten miles round trip. Probably not again.]

This is the hollow in sandstone facing the ocean that I call “The Little Altar.” Usually by this time of year there is a circle of green algae on the back. This year, there are three green penguins. Can you see them? Two looking south, a youngster flapping and pointed north? (And yes, there is a Big Altar a few feet north. No penguins.)

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CAT POPULATION

May 29, 2026May 29, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

I was reading an upbeat story about a species of dove native to a Pacific island that had become extinct in the wild since 1972 due to human activity and human-introduced species. Cats are often cited as the cause of the birds’ extinction, but the real damage to the birds’ survival had been domestic sheep that destroyed their habitat, explained a scientist with Mexico’s Institute of Ecology who is leading habitat restoration efforts on the island. The cats merely finished off an already decimated population. What is missing may be another cause, too often ignored: human-introduced rats.

“I hear you have an opening?” Leakey invited herself into our home a couple of weeks after Zora Neale Hurston Cougar Cat, “Zora,” died at age 19. It was January and we learned that Leakey with two other cats had been dumped the previous late summer. There had been sitings, but the cats were shy. My theory was that the cats had managed well enough, feasting on wild rodents until winter when the chipmunks were estivating. By the time she showed up at our door, Leakey was starving, weighing less than half what she should. She quickly put on weight with us, but never lost the habit of hunting. Leakey had a small meow and a loud purr and developed a love/hate relationship with our Saluki, Yeti. She was gentle and sweet-tempered but also had the longest and sharpest claws I have ever seen on a domestic cat. Rodents were her prey of choice and like Zora before her, she often ate her catch, but not the rats laid out for Gary to dispose of. [I did try to coax the other abandoned cats to join the family, but no. Only Leakey.]

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CROSSING TO SAFETY

May 8, 2026May 8, 2026 / janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

When I cross the street I look both ways, even when I’m in a crosswalk, even with there is a light telling me I may, and I look both ways even at a crossing of two one-way streets where I shouldn’t have to look. Drivers in the early morning aren’t always paying attention to someone like me.

People like me are concerned about where our country is headed, but first: Safety while running.