pandemic

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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WRITING ON

/ 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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‘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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