ON GIVING UP

April 6, 2021April 8, 2021 / janpriddyoregon / 10 Comments

We walked north all the way around Hug Point and into the next beach last week. All the wave-swept stone was coated in green, like matching jackets. I would have walked to Arcadia, another half mile, but we’d have had to come home on the highway and there are a couple of dangerous stretches I know too well from when I was running.

I meant to share photos. It was an accomplishment to walk that far on the beach before the end of March.

The seaweed will begin to go once the sun is high enough to burn it during low tide.

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WRITING ON

April 3, 2021April 29, 2021 / janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

We go out for our morning walk well before dawn most days. We like to be the first on the sand—going out extra early we only meet other walkers on our way home. We inevitably find ourselves beach combing, even when we declare at the beginning that we will not walk so far. We will simply go out and home, and then we are trolling up and down that rocky shore. Everything has been stirred and shifted each morning. We found almost 200 pieces of seaglass in the last week or so. The flat-smooth pebbles and agates we’ve gathered had been taking over the house.

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MOON

March 30, 2021March 31, 2021 / janpriddyoregon / 11 Comments

We try to walk out at first light. The sand is washed smooth, gulls rest onshore, and no one else is out—most people are still sleeping.

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SHAKEN & STIRRED UP

March 28, 2021March 30, 2021 / janpriddyoregon / 9 Comments

It was about 2:45pm, and we were taking a nap when a huge crash blew us out of bed. We knew immediately what it was.

Yeah, it happened again. Another board through our roof. [see “Shaken Not Stirred”]

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YEARLING CROWS

March 26, 2021March 26, 2021 / janpriddyoregon / 11 Comments

These two are nest-mates, we think, not pair-bonded. We see them every day in about this place on the power lines, near the Fentons’ home.

“I think deep down inside children are all the same,” she said. “They want two loving parents and they would prefer a house with a neighborhood they can play in. They want teachers that they can like. I don’t think children have changed that much. It’s the world that has changed.”
—Beverly Cleary

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SO MUCH WANTS DOING

March 25, 2021 / janpriddyoregon / 6 Comments

Hello world. I’m writing about covid and my BMI and tidying up. You might want to stop right here and not read any more. The pizza was wonderful, btw.

Mushroom, olive, cheese pizza on sourdough crust.

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WEAVING WEATHER

March 20, 2021March 30, 2021 / janpriddyoregon / 12 Comments

This is what’s on my loom just now: the third 94″ length for a blanket! It shifts pattern from long block to narrow and in the middle from dark coral to purple. What you cannot see in this photo is how it went from the warm colors in the lower part of the photo to what I am currently weaving. Magic!

I promise to post a photo of the blanket when the three lengths are finished and seamed.

My studio degrees are in ceramics and metal. I exhibited while still an undergrad and completed commissions. But after I graduated I never really went back to clay or gold. Instead, I went for fabric.

Important influences include Kaffe Fassett’s Glorious Color, Randall Darwall’s breathtaking silk weaving, and my grandfather’s wife Genevieve and my friend Toni who gave me looms.

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SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED

March 19, 2021March 19, 2021 / janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

Tomorrow is officially spring, but it’s still winter here. Coastal weather is not like inland. When Portland is fretting about 45mph gusts, we’re out walking in it. Sixty-five miles per hour, seventy. That’s typical in winter.

I woke in the night to a bang, but it’s happened so often in the past three months that I didn’t think too much of it. The house to the south is being “remodeled” and the contractor has repeatedly failed to adequately secure the site.

The firm hired to do the work seems not to understand about wind. They stripped off the roofing the beginning of January and since then the felt has torn off three times and plastic tarp has torn off twice as well. Three months without a roof.

And now this damage to our atrium roof. (Not to mention our Miele vacuum cleaner happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gary is uncharacteristically optimistic that it will survive.)