jellyfish

INSTEAD, A NEIGHBORHOOD

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments
We’ve seen many orange jellyfish [west coast sea nettle, Chrysaora fuscenscens] stranded onshore in the past week. This is one of the half dozen largest from yesterday, about two feet across that center section, another 20 inches wider if measuring the splayed “arms'”, and yes, these sting. The colorless to blueish ones, moon jellies [water jelly, Aequorea sp.], don’t sting—just don’t touch any jelly and then put your hand in your eye or mouth. I’ve never been stung, but I’ve known to be careful since I was little.

I walked more than three miles yesterday and I wasn’t even sore when I got home. Miraculous! Gary and I went north to our “Turnaround Rock” a mile and half, up and down the beach, backtracking and noting how high the sand is. It was the furthest we’d walked since April. We met two local people we hadn’t seen in months. Earlier this week, we met a friend we hadn’t seen since last year! They all said they’d wondered what happened to us. It was my foot.

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EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING

/ janpriddyoregon / 10 Comments
This is the largest “sea nettle” I have ever seen, dwarfing Gary’s size 13 shoes. It was at least 28″ across—Gary said three feet.

We’ve been busy hustling back and forth, walking our 25 miles a week (and me running a few of those), working on our second home, and admiring everything we see.

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ONE THING or the OTHER

/ janpriddyoregon / 25 Comments

My 50th high school reunion is coming up in less than a week. It is actually our 51st graduation anniversary, but there was that pandemic. Actually, the pandemic is still raging, and locally it’s worse than ever with more cases daily than we saw in a month last year. I live in a tourism destination and we routinely see license plates from Texas and Florida, Georgia and Tennessee, not to mention plenty from Washington, Idaho, and California. Sometimes there are more cars from out of state than Oregon on the road. Who can blame them for coming?

Almost the entire PNW is suffering from fire or the smoke of blazing forests. Air quality was so bad in Portland last week, it was labeled “hazardous” to health and people were advised to stay indoors. The one grace is that smoke-polluted air makes for glorious sunrises and sunsets. The dawn and late afternoons have shown peach-colored suns. The color in this photo is not what my eye saw, which was quite red. Yet tourists persist in lighting beach fires, even in wind. The air is fine here, but you might think that people would consider climate change?
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‘WHAT PARTY?’

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments
“Jellyfish” are neither jelly nor fish, but that’s okay. It’s just a common name. This one is specifically called a Pacific sea nettle (Chrysaora fuscescens), which suggests why my dad warned me as a child not to touch the orange ones.

The joke goes like this: What are the two saddest words in the English language?

What Party?

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