Graphic Firing Table

"And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which..."

~ Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 2, Scene 1 

(Maxine has become the Garden Goddess this spring, and this chaplet of sweet spring dandelion buds is her work. Very nice, sweetie.)

"I want to go to Silver Falls, Daddy!"

I have no idea why the Small One remembers going to this place, deep in the bosky dells of Marion County, in the lesser foothills of the Cascades. But she did, and her mom didn't want to drag herself down the long road southeast from Portland, so Sunday was a Daddy and Daughter Day Out, on the road to Silver Falls State Park.

So after a lazy morning the Girl and I started our adventure making sushi for lunch.

Yes. Sushi. The Small One is quite the sushi-chef.

She wields her makisu 巻き簾, the bamboo rolling-mat with the precision and flair of the true itamae-san as she crafts her tempura shrimp-rolls (her favorite).

Perhaps it's her small fingers, or, just perhaps, it's her love of the sweet savor and delicate crunchiness of the tobiko that leads her to sprinkle it liberally inside her makizushi.
The rolls are carefully sliced (that's Daddy's job...) and packed in the cooler, and the goodbyes are said; effusive to the relieved Mother, curt to the deliberately indifferent Brother, and we squeeze into the little Honda for the long ride.

And it IS a long ride; down through Portland and onto the freeway. South through the surprisingly heavy Sunday traffic choke-points of the Terwilliger Curves, Tigard, Wilsonville, and the Boone Bridge, before finally escaping to the relatively speedy stretch south of the Willamette River where the broad flatlands stretch away, green with summer and dark with a cloudy morning's rain.

The Girl keeps up a stream of chatter because...well, because she's a little chatterer. She enjoys her own silliness, exclaims little-girl affection for random farm animals that would intimidate her if encountered up close. She scoffs at her older brother's idleness in front of a video screen and hopes for an adventure in the woods ahead.

Off the freeway at the greedy sprawl of Woodburn, then east, then south along the faded strip of Highway 99 until we reach the left turn for Silverton. From there it is truly into the undeveloped lands of the east edge of the Willamette Valley.

The valley itself is, to my eyes, an unappealing square flatness of farm field and copse. Southeast of Woodburn, however, the land rises into pleasant undulation towards the cloud-wrapped mountains beyond.

The road itself loses its drab linearity and winds, dips, and climbs in an entertaining fashion, made all the more pleasing by not being blocked by sluggish tractors or gear-grinding heavy trucks. The Girl and I sail through the woods and fields and are passing through the faux-Teutonic hamlet of Mount Angel in short minutes.
Small One is perplexed, then amused, by my insistence that the wooded hilltop east of the town is occupied by actual monks, and laughs at the fakey-German gimcracks as we pass through.

But her laugh is on me when we stop at the IGA grocery outside Silverton to pick her up a bottle of water. It turns out that today is the culmination of "Homer Davenport Days" in the little town and she gleefully predicts a "Tulip Festival", crowing with delight at the prospect of a Furious Daddy.

("Tulip Festival", by the way, is family shorthand for "some unforeseen event that creates incandescent rage in the parent", after the time my father the Master Chief was driving my family to our annual vacation in upper western Michigan and got stuck in the middle of some sort of Holland, Michigan celebration.

Of course, in those pre-Internet days he, and we, had no idea that this was a thing until the traffic on the little road through town - this being the late Sixties the idea of a highway or bypass up the east side of Lake Michigan was an arrant fantasy - slowed, and then slowed, and then stopped and sat.

So we sat. And sat. In a dark green station wagon. In the August heat. For several hours. While my father, normally a man of moderate temper and inexpressive mien, grew more furious by the moment.

By the time the traffic began to move and we crept through the festive town my father would have cheerfully nuked Holland, Michigan, and all its inhabitants into a glowing slag and danced gleefully upon the ruin.

Ever since then the prospect of seeing the top of the paternal parent's head fly off in rage has been the sincere wish of both children, and Missy was practically chortling in hope.)

Sadly for The Girl, the Tulip Festival (or Homer Day, or whatever...) was confined to a side street and we sailed through Silverton practically without a check and up into the close-set woodlands and rising hills above us.

Reaching the north end parking lot we find that we're not the only people who decided to visit that day; the lot is full, and we have to look around for an alternative. That turns out to be a gravel side road with a broad shoulder where we leave little Stinky the Honda and walk back to find our path for the day.


That turns out to be, first, "Little North Falls", a pretty box-canyon headed by a pinnate rush of cold, clear water. We admire the pools in the slickrock at the base and the size of the trees felled and boulders moved by the winter floods.


The Girl finds water striders dimpling the glassy surface and makes little wavelets to make them skitter away. I stop to take pictures of the passage of the winter's kolks; the sudden holes in the basalt filled with grindstones where dark gray-green crayfish scuttle into the shadow when we loom over them.


A young couple has, in "defiance of municipal regulations", brought their small white terrier with them to the falls. The little creature is, in violation of normal terrier mores, hesitant about rushing around sniffing and detecting, perhaps because of the water-slick rock.

My own little creature is, as is her wont, entranced. While she found having an actual dog somewhat of a nuisance as a pet she enjoys other people's dogs and is coo-ish and enticing towards this one which, however, is only mildly curious in return about the small cozening human. Perhaps this has something to do with the Small One's lack of food.From there it is back to the bridge over Silver Creek and then down the trail to "North Falls"; this is what the Girl remembers, though she is dismissive of the small plume of falling water.

"It was a LOT bigger last time!" she declares.
Indeed, the plume is much diminished from the earlier spring when we last visited. The crowds are somewhat larger, however, and I force myself not to make an irked sound as we pass the self-impressed boobs using some sort of scribing tool to etch their little piece of eternity into the rock ceiling.

Missy wants to lob a rock into the fall, so we carefully pick out a spot where we can see all the way to the plunge pool and she lets fly; the palm-sized projectile flies about a quarter of the way out to the cascade before arcing down into the swordfern and vinemaple.

Still; Missy is well pleased with herself, and skips on down the trail to where it meets Silver Creek some quarter-mile or so further on.

There she entertains herself mightily plonking rocks in the water, launching clover petals, and using the swagger stick I picked up to riffle the cold waters not long removed from the snowfields of the High Cascades.


We share this little slackwater with a Filipino family, whose youngest son is rampaging through the water soaking his clothing and generally ignoring the requests, imprecations, and demands of his female relatives with squalling defiance. I foresee a difficult adolescence for Young Master, whose expectation of similar indulgence from the larger world is likely to go as unfulfilled as the Silver Creek channel is today.

The Girl is ready to continue on, but I know the capability of those short legs better than their owner does, so I turn us backward, heading the short way towards the north parking lot. We circle back under North Falls, casting another stone along the way and pausing to ooh and ah at the tree casts, the cylindrical voids in the overlying basalt ceiling formed by millions-year-old trees that were buried in the flowing lava.
These piers are empty, hollow columns rising into the darkness overhead unlike the tree-cast I once told you about. But they, too, to me seem fraught, empty yet full of the vanished forest and the uncountable years.

The Small One is only mildly impressed.

She is more excited retelling another, more recent Family Legend, this one the story of Daddy and Mommy and Pre-Mommy and the Boring Little Brown Bird* ("Mommy was mad because she wanted Thanksgiving Dinner more than the Boring Bird!")

She pockets the two smooth stones she picked up along the creek, momentos of her adventurous day.

The drive home is unremarkable outside the appalling tie-up the begins south of the Aurora exit and continues grinding along in fits and starts painfully slowly almost to North Wilsonville before, suddenly and inexplicably, dissipating.

The Small One is weary from her hike (and a brief hop to our Powell's bookstore for some new stories to read...) and remains in the back seat reading about kitten Chi's newest shenanigans rather than take the few steps into the store we stop to get her brother's much-needed XBOX accessories.


But she is again chatty and excited when we get back home, informing her mother (and her brother, if he cared enough to listen) all the excitement we shared in the Oregon Wild. She bounces off into her back room with her new book in hand.

And returns a quarter hour later, flops down backwards on the parental bed, and announces with a sigh and a voice heavy with the pain of bottomless ennui:

"I'm bored."


*(The official version of the story of "Mommy, Daddy, Pre-Mommy and the Boring Little Brown Bird" ("Oregon's First Louisiana Waterthrush") is told in the first article in above-linked issue of Oregon Birds, the publication of the Oregon Birding Association (then the Oregon Field Ornithologists).

For some reason I find it richly amusing that the citation for the initial sighting of Oregon's first (and, so far as I know, only) record of this species is shared by my current wife, my ex-wife, and me. My children, for some inexplicable reason, do not find this nearly as entertaining)

The violins of autumn don't get much of a solo around here. More like a two-bar bridge and then it's off to the drizzling continuo of winter rain. "Fall color" lasts from about 2:45 to 4:50 on November 1 every year; after that the rains knock all the bright leaves down to where they form a glutineous mass in every catchbasin and a slimy coating on level ground.

I still love the autumn. But the Northwest version isn't the sort of thing that inspires poets and balladeers. It's just the introduction to the Dark Ages of winter, and much as we try and enjoy it the pleasure is fleeting.

Speaking of wilderness, and since the small predators that live among us are on my mind (Little Cat has been doing nastily worse over the past week) I note in passing the summary of this "research" that appeared in the N.Y. Times:

"...the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes."

(Cautionary note: the full article is likely behind the NYT paywall...)


While the Fire Direction Center has housed two of these fearsome predators for over ten years and as such has seen tangible proof of the moggies' ability to take various furred and feathered prey, I'm still not sure that I buy this story of the domestic cat as Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.


For one thing, it goes a long way towards absolving us hairless monkeys for all the other things we do that are tremendously effective in destroying wild animals. As Erik Loomis notes; humans in general are the single worst thing for wildlife on the living Earth. "Worse than land mines, worse than nuclear meltdown."

Perhaps the single greatest "story" of the last 200 years of life on Earth has been the emergence of humans as something beyond the global apex predator. Cats, dogs, tigers, sharks...all have to do their killing retail. We can literally reshape the earth. We level mountains, fill in canyons, we seem to be changing the global climate.

I'm not trying to argue against the conclusion that people need to neuter their pets, need to stop dumping them into fields and streets, should really keep them inside, or not keep them at all if "inside" is just too damn small for an animal to live comfortably (or if they are simply left outside in a yard bored out of their doggie skulls.

What I am saying is that the Great American Public - 95% of Joe and Molly Lunchpail (rising to 99.8% if they have any sort of Tea Party membership card somewhere on their person or a Romney sticker on their car) - is dumber than a goddamn stump about scientific facts in general, and this sort of "reporting" does them no favors.

Remember this when your Uncle Alex, the teabagging appliance salesman, tells you for the zillionteenth time how Global Warming isn't the problem, feral cats are the problem.

The recent dearth of posting is because I've been up in the foothills of the Olympic mountains on a job...


It's a pretty spot, and the project - building a footbridge for the Park Service - is a trifle less grubby than the usual sort of "7-Eleven" and "filling station" projects that make up the working week of a private geotech, but sadly the part we're involved in hasn't gone well and is likely to end up in litigation. Well, shit.


This week the normal outdoors adventure was enhanced by about two to three feet of old snow on the trail into the site. This stuff was the worst of Northwest snow; wet, slushy on top when it wasn't glazed with ice, heavy, and dirty with needle- and bark litter. In several places it had corniced over the narrow trail and there was a certain...thrill of uncertainty...whether one was walking on two feet of old, rotten melting snow over the trail or two feet of old, rotten melting snow over...nothing.


And the weather, too, managed to be the worst of the Pacific climate; cold but not cold enough for snow. So you got a steady misting rain but never warmed up above the forties. The wet raingear and the chill air combined to suck the heat out of you; I had no less than five layers on, including a heavy snow parka, on Monday and found myself shivering like a vibrating string all afternoon. Brrrr.


This week's work went as planned. But that well is poisoned already, and all factions are whetting their legal knives. It made the slippery walk to and fro each day seem a little longer and colder.


And I'm due to return next week to test the anchors installed in this one.

I hope the weather turns either warmer or colder by then. The feeling of hunching miserably under a cold rain is all too reminiscent of too many bad days I spent in the field in my youth.

My friend Maia has a post up about her family's recent trip to the red rock country of Colorado around Moab. Which reminded me of the time I spent there back in the Nineties. My ex-wife and I went on a Sierra Club "service trip" which involved working as volunteers for the National Park Service. In our case, removing and rebuilding fence along "Dry and Rocky Mesa" in Arches National Park.


In case you were wondering, the guy on the left is me. I loved that old desert night parka. Wish I knew what the hell had happened to it. I wish I knew what the hell had happened to that cocky young guy, too. Well, I know what happened; just wish I'd treated his body a hell of a lot better when it worked like it did when he looked like that.

Anyway, Arches N.P. was a hell of a beautiful place, and I'll have to post about my time there. For now how about just a savor of the dry and rocky silence of the redrock desert on a chilly, raw Northwest day?

If I seem downcast in my posting lately it's partly because the Rains have arrived in force. I always have a tough couple of weeks getting used to the cold, wet, and dark.If there's another thing it's because I have a job that is going very badly on me, and one that involves a great deal of walking around on my bad hip. So I get up very early to drive a long way, then walk a mile or two with my hip aching like a Congressman for a lobbyist's wallet, and then everything at the job goes wrong and everyone is pissed off at everyone else.
Don't get me wrong; walking a mile through the beautiful Northwest woods is still better than a kick in the face and a toxic waste dump in downtown Gresham. But don't tell me that when my ass is aching and not just because the client took another bit out of it.

What a fuckin' fuckstory, as my old pal James used to say.

Hmmm. I think I wanted to take a moment from all the angst and provide a post with no meaning beyond the sensual;That, and every so often I take a genuinely good picture; I just love this snapshot of our Overlook Park on a sunny Sunday.

For all our troubles and toil, the world is often a lovely place. It is unfortunate that we are often to harried and busy to stop and notice that. I hope you have a moment today to do so.

Just back from two days drilling at the Coast. A few showers (it's the Coast, after all...) but mostly just some good days' work in the mountains by the sea.And, as you can tell, the salmonberries are ripening. And that's always a good thing.

"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,""...and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea,""...and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."Aah...

Wait!

What?

(h/t to Pharyngula)

Is it any wonder we all once worshiped the Sun?A reminder that for all our hubris, we're a pretty puny lot, really.

Every so often the Earth likes to remind us that for all our hubris we're still just hairless monkeys with homicidal tendencies. And that for REAL destruction, Mother Earth is one BAD motherfucker.And the quote of the day so far (from Nancy Nall): "I wept because I had three inches of new, wet snow in my driveway, and then I met a man who had 12 feet of Pacific Ocean in his."

Back in the Sixties the concessionaire that ran the hotel at the top of Hosetail Falls in Yosemite National Park used to do this thing where his staff would set up this big ol' bonfire at the top of the Glacier Point cliff. As dark was falling they'd light this sucker up, get a good hot blaze going, and then...well, let's let this guy take up the story:

"At 9:00 each evening in Camp Curry, the crowd which had gathered for the nightly campfire program, would fall silent. A man would call out to the top of Glacier Point "Let the Fire Fall!", and a faint reply could be heard from the top of the mountain. Then a great bonfire of red fir bark would be pushed evenly over the edge of the cliff, appearing to the onlookers below as a glowing waterfall of sparks and fire."

This went on from the 1870s until 1968, when the Park Service came to the realization that horsing burning logs off a cliff in a wildland national park wasn't, well, very "wild".Or natural. And stopped doing it. There are people who have been grousing about this ever since.

But the thing is that it turns out that under the right conditions Yosemite's Horsetail Falls can do the same thing or better:

"If there's enough water and if the sky's clear enough to get a sunset, the setting sun will be at an angle to the falls and this causes it to glow. It's rare to get such great conditions - a lot of water and decent sky. It's pretty wild to see because, at first, you can barely make out the waterfall. As the sun starts to set, it glows yellow a bit and then, all of a sudden, it lights up and looks like lava."

Gorgeous, isn't it?But isn't that just like fucking Nature?

Instead of giving us a good show when WE want it, it makes us wait and wait and wait and wait until everything is just right before doing something spectacular. And sometimes it never does it at all.

No wonder more people go to Disneyland.

Intriguing bit of history courtesy of the UK Daily Mail.Seems that in the late 1960's the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with investigating cliff retreat along the smaller, American-side fall at Niagara. This is reported to have come about because of one journalist, a Mr. Cliff Spieler of the Niagara Falls Gazette.

Mister Spieler wrote about the large rock falls in 1931 and 1954 that had created a large talus pile at the bast of the American falls, and that a combination of continued rockfall and headward erosion could "kill" the falls. This caught on with the American public, and in late 1965, the U.S. and Canada set up an International Joint Commission. Two years later, the American Falls International Board recommended damming the Niagara River above the falls in order to conduct geotechnical analysis of the falls.The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) – Buffalo District was assigned the project, and from June 9, to November 25, 1969 no water flowed over the American falls for the first time in nearly 12,000 years.

The USACE drill crews cored the sedimentary rock that formed the falls, scaled loose materials off the rock face, and installed several instruments, including extensometers, in suspected areas of weak rock. After a long period of preparation people were allowed into the dry riverbed, where they gathered coins tossed into the immense wishing well over the decades and just gawked at the scenery.Geologists scampered all over, measuring, sampling, performing dye tests and mapping joint and fracture patterns.Among the huge rock debris at the base of the falls were man-made debris and the bodies of a man, a deer, and

"the badly decomposed body of a woman jammed head first amongst the rocks about half way up talus bank. The woman was clad in a red and white horizontally striped jersey or dress and a narrow gold wedding band with the inscription “forget me not” on the inside."

No record of what the deer was wearing.

After Thanksgiving, 1969, the water was set free and has flowed over the falls ever since.

After five months of work including 46 core borings totaling 4,882 feet, mapping, probing, installing piezometers to measure water pressure on rock joints, extensometers to measure rock movements, and a further six years of study and opinion polling the IJC concluded that:

It was technically feasible to remove the talus but was not considered desirable.

The Falls could but should not be stabilized by artificial means

And that while the two flanks of the American Falls and the Goat Island flank of the Horseshoe Falls were sufficiently unstable to warrant remedial action a statistically minor element of risk from unpredictable rock movement would remain and must be accepted by the viewing public.So nothing more was ever done.

And the American falls still flow.

Got back late last night from three days of exploratory drilling in the high valleys in the north side of the Olympic National Park. The Elwha Valley, to be exact.So for the three days of the 2010 election my day consisted of rising before the sun, eating a rather disappointing breakfast at the Super 8 Motel, driving up into the tributary valleys of the Elwha River, working until sunset, driving down into Port Angeles, finding food and eating it, bathing, and a moment or two of reading before sleep knocked me down like a runaway trolley car.

I was asleep by nine every night.The work was satisfying, though, and the setting was spectacular. In case you've never seen them, the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula have been crafted by artists or photographers to be perfectly spectacular, mountainous-looking mountains. They are like the Platonic ideal of mountains, the sort of improbably sheer, improbably cragged, improbably massive-looking peaks you see in paintings in every cheap motel room.Well, except for the Super 8 Motel; there are no paintings in a Super 8 Motel. The coffee kinda sucks, too.

One intriguing thing about our work area was how deep it was in the canyon. We had glorious sunny weather the last two days, and both days we watched the terminator glide down the mountainside behind us as the corona brightened atop the ridge across the river. The light crept down, the glow over the treetops increased, until at about 12:15 the sun lifted over the crest.

And set at 12:35.I'm serious - I think we had about fifteen to twenty minutes of direct sunlight both days. It's a wonder that anything grows in that dark canyon but moss and fungi.

But it did, and the canyon was lush with the wet fecundity of the Northwest. This included the passersby, who were, mostly, locals heading up to the hot spring. Although the Park Service did their best to make this caldera sound unappetizing (mentioning especially the bacteria, which made me think of yeasty sorts of things infesting the unlucky bather's organs of generation...) the traffic was light but steady.The contractor we were working with mentioned that apparently clothing was typically not an option there at the spring, delivering this detail in salacious tones, but the prospective nude frolickers I met all seemed to be resoundingly unerotic. Nothing frightening, just the antithesis of the sort of rapacious voluptuousness Twenty-first Century America considers "sexy", figures that promised a sort of outdoor sturdiness combined with the small things that separate a woman who uses her body for work and play rather than gets work from the look of her body; roughened skin in the used places like the palms of hands and soles of feet. Thickened wrists, small scars or similar pain-marks left by a mishandled tool or an unseen file drawer. Hair untended other than by washing and drying.

Perfectly attractive women, just not the sort of improbably pneumatic naiad to drive men mad with lust at the sight of them crouching naked in a hot pool talking about the copier problems at work.I did my work, packed up and drove the four hours back to Portland to find that the country has, apparently, had a temper tantrum and decided that since it can't have everything it wants for nothing it will try putting the biggest idiots it can find in positions of power and see how well that works out.

I can just imagine, but not surprisingly Ed at "ginandtacos" already imagined it and better than I ever could (tho the italics are mine):

"As our entire political culture is built on the foundational idea that no one has to live with the consequences of their own actions, that means that Option #1 (the new teatards actually do "cut government spending", i.e. rip the pork teat out of the mouths of the local districts) is about as likely as a Pittsburgh Pirates World Series appearance in 2011. Option #2 (the Tea Crackers discover that, while "government spending is Very, Very BAD, "government spending" for THEM is...ummm...not so bad), of course, means that absolutely nothing will change. The giant freshman class of Republicans – an unsightly parade of the lame, the halt, and the ugly – will very quickly fall in line with the norms of the institution, trying their damnedest to secure their own re-election by redirecting as much of everyone else's tax dollars to his or her district as possible."

This situation seems to have been somewhat moderated here in Oregon, where most of our Dems held their seats and, best of all, the ridiculous gubernatorial bid of former Blazers basketball guard Chris Dudley (was he a guard? Guards seems to have a reputation for thinking of stuff, plays, maybe. Whatever.) was barely foiled in order to return to the Mahonia Mansion former Governor Kitzhaber, who basically staged a sit-down strike the LAST time we ran out of money, back in the Nineties, refusing to sign the idiotic bills the Republican legislature sent him.

He's not exactly electrifying and he has no idea what to do, either, with a state that can't run a deficit, doesn't (yet) want to become Zaire complete with poisonous food, toxic air and water, and yet refuses to tax itself. Or even eighty-six the fucking moronic "kicker" law. He's been elected to be the monkey wrangler on a Monkey Island where every goddam monkey thinks nobody else should get to fling poop but him or her but that he or she should be able to fling their poop without regards for safety, common sense, public weal, scenic value, or anything at all other than their own fucking amusement.

It's an impossible job and I wouldn't take it you paid me in gold and virgins.Mind you, the state I had just left had given itself a knee square in its own balls; refusing to tax even its wealthiest plutocrats AND instated the idiotic 2/3rds "supermajority" rule to prevent their legislature from raising taxes on their own, either. The goal there seems to be to prove that Californians are not the only people who can fuck up an entire state within a generation. We had one of those supermajority rules, too, chumps - it worked about as well as you'd expect. Good luck with that, but I'll bet you'll end up being sorry.

So in the main we're still fucked, and we've now chosen to select some of the most gonzo fuckers from amongst us to lead us. This is the sort of logic that leads men to try and use electric meat grinders for self-pleasure. It cannot and will not end well, whilst the blood and screaming produced by the process will be extremely distressing.Damn. I guess it really is impossible to lose money betting on the stupidity of the American public.

Amazing. Beautiful. Frightening.

Those of you who've followed this blog for a while know that I enjoy birds and watching birds. And you might remember that of the birds, perhaps my favorites are the clever members of the corvid species; the crows, jays and ravens.

These guys are the Cantonese of the bird world - smart, aggressive, adaptable and ubiquitous. And now a young woman from Seattle named Lyanda Haupt has written a new book about them and their success in a human-dominated world.

"Crow Planet" is her personal observations of the corvids, and especially the more human-adapted species of corvids such as the American Crow of her home town.

I haven't yet read her work, but the reviewers suggest that she covers some informative and entertaining ground, including her own personal observations of the crows of West Seattle. Her blog, "The Tangled Nest" includes her ruminations on the birds as well as recipes, urban gardening tips and an embarassment of other notions. Lyanda seems to be a very Northwest sort of Hip Urban Mama, full of crunchy granola wisdom and jam cooking hints. The reveiwers also noted that the reach of her prose seems to exceed her grasp, for the same reasons - which is not by any means a reason to avoid her work.

In a lot of ways people are very crow: we tend to be fascinated by cheap and glittery objects, we take what we want rather than just what we need, and we tend to hold our grudges long after they benefit us. So I'd recommend her new book to anyone looking for an insight in both crows, and people.

Incredible: Sarychev Peak in the Kuril Island chain, northeast of Japan, on June 12.From MSNBC: "The main plume appears to be a combination of brown ash and white steam, according to a NASA statement. The vigorously rising plume gives the steam a bubble-like appearance. The surrounding atmosphere has been shoved up by the shock wave of the eruption. The smooth white cloud on top may be water condensation that resulted from rapid rising and cooling of the air mass above the ash column. This cloud is probably a transient feature, which the eruption plume is starting to punch through."

Volcanoes, the OJ Simpson of nature - powerful, sexy, fascinating, but you trust them and they'll flat-out kill your ass.