Pig-Sticker

Day 61: You won't find many of these around. This is a stiletto, a dagger with a three-sided blade. It was custom-made for me to go with a mediaeval costume about 35 years ago when I was involved with a group called the Society for Creative Anachronism. Members of the group dressed in elaborate period costumes for events, and my involvement with the group led me to engagements in the "mundane" world as a performer on the harp. While I didn't carry the stiletto to my gigs, it was part of my regular regalia for group functions. I thought I'd lost it somewhere along the way, but just last week, I was searching for something else and came across it in a box appropriately labelled, "Odd bits."

Boundary Trail, Tahoma Woods

Day 118: When the forecast rain hadn't materialized by 10:30 AM, I decided to seize the day and go for a walk. In so doing, I discovered a trail I hadn't known existed on the north and east sides of Park Headquarters at Tahoma Woods. The forest floor was lush with some type of step moss (bryology is a sea in which I do not swim at all well) and my poor little point-and-shoot camera, carried instead of the SX30 IS, recorded the melange of winter greens and browns with a warm wash, warping the photographic temperature toward an unnatural yellow hue. But it was not the color I wanted to capture. It was the complexity of the environment I hoped to portray, and I found that tone-mapping and converting the image to "box camera" served my purpose best. Here, you can see each scale of bark, each ferny frond of moss without the distraction of color. It makes me wonder if perhaps color vision isn't inferior after all.

Silver Fog

Day 114: Today I am making an exception to my unspoken rule restricting photos shot on a previous day. Why? Because I like photographing fog, and this was a "happy accident" shot yesterday in Pack Forest. I'd forgotten I had the camera set to black-and-white and was concerned that the sun would dispel the rays if I hesitated too long. Even so, the natural monochrome of the scene was such that it took me a second to realize what was missing in the recorded image, i.e., color. I reshot, but in the end, decided I liked the black-and-white version best.

My first experience with using a 35mm film camera came about when I was planning a backcountry trip to take my mother to the ranger station where her brother had served in the 1950s. I had always been reluctant to learn how to use a "real" camera, having grown up with a box Brownie and later a Polaroid Instamatic, but my husband was an accomplished photographer and convinced me to carry his Mamiya-Sekor on the trip after giving me a crash course in operating it. I returned home a week later with several rolls of exposed film, and many of the images were of fog winding amongst the trees or drifting over the lake. Thus my love of "fogtography" began.

Hiking in fog is a magical experience (at least when it's not so dense that you miss the ends of switchbacks as I've done on several occasions). Trees and shrubbery take on new dimensions as the fog accentuates their distance from other objects. Though blurred by mist, leaves stand apart from their fellows, separated by a gauze of ephemeral droplets. Familiar paths reform their curves and corners into mysterious new topographies. Distances shorten in the sight and lengthen in the mind, relativistically skewed in time and space by the playful wraiths of fog. Fog-walks are not to everyone's taste, their magic taking an eerie inflection with concealments and illusions, but those of us who know the fog-faeries delight in their innocent mischief and revel in their pranks. Fog is friendly. Fog is fun, and it gives us a hazy, dizzy new perspective on an otherwise mundane world.

Tapped

Day 96: A few months ago, I turned on the kitchen cold tap, filled the cats' water dish and shut it off again. The water kept running. It was just a trickle, but I could not make it shut off no matter how many times I opened and closed the tap. I'm sure I must have rolled my eyes as I swore, but for some reason, my hand strayed to the HOT tap and opened it. When I shut it off, the trickle stopped. I tried to duplicate the phenomenon with no luck and things went smoothly for a couple of weeks until it happened again: I turned the cold on and off, a trickle ran, and only stopped when I opened and closed the hot tap.

It didn't happen consistently, and there was no pattern to when it might occur...no association with high or low water pressure, nor with the pump cycling on. It occurred randomly, and days might go by before it happened again, but one day, the sporadic spouting took an even stranger twist when running water in the bathtub caused the hot to flow.

Having done my share of plumbing and not wishing to venture into those rough waters again, I asked a friend to look at it. The misbehaving tap obligingly performed its curious malfunction right before his eyes. Likewise, when I had a contractor in for a different issue, he also witnessed the peculiar behaviour and diagnosed the problem as a bad fixture. Based on his expert opinion, I purchased a new faucet and another friend volunteered to install it.

Plumbing is always fraught with unpleasant surprises, and it made no exception to that rule today. Ronnie shut off the water at the valves and as he unscrewed the flexible hose, he got a faceful of water. The valve would not close completely. I manned the bucket brigade as Ronnie completed the installation (one nut didn't want to unscrew). The flunky fixture is no more and the mysterious cold/hot connection is resolved, but he plans to come back when the weather gets warmer to replace the valve.