autumnal excesses

By now you have probably guessed that this is my favorite season. I have a large file of shots I've still not uploaded, so here are a few I've disgorged this morning for your viewing pleasure. At least I hope it's pleasurable... I am so lucky to live in a beautiful neighborhood that has a wonderful--even miraculous--timelessness somehow here in the early 21st century.

November Northwest

I realize that the shots below are a bit, um, eclectic as far as collections go, but they were all taken on the same 15-minute walk around the neighborhood where I work in NW Portland. It's endlessly fascinating to me, and since I have a bit of history here--I originally lived in this neighborhood in the summer and fall of 1971 before moving away to start my family--it feels right to document it now.

Grandparents & Special Guest Day

I received a personal invitation to come to Grayson's school for Grandparents & Special Guest Day on October 29th, but I had a dental appointment for that morning. Fortunately I just needed a routine cleaning and exam so I bombed out of the dentist's chair and managed to get to Buckman School just in time! I enjoyed the morning's assembly and then got a tour of Grayson's classroom and then got to sit at his desk while we composed a poem together, and then he showed me some artist software that he's been using. All of the classrooms at Buckman were gifted with small laptops from Intel because Mr. Scott, Grayson's teacher, had been doing some consulting work for them! Coolio.

Do you see Grayson?

Third-graders in Mr. Scott's class dance at Grandparents & Special Guest Day at Buckman School. Interpretive...

G-man and his classroom laptop.

loose ends

After SUCH a long time between posts I'm jammed with updates so want to get as much down today as I can. But I have no photos yet for the biggest news: I'm going to be a grandmother again for the third time in March! AND I bought a car this weekend. Incredible on both counts: it's been over eight years since I last owned a car, and over eight years since my daughter gave birth the last time! Funny.

I'm completely freaked out by the sudden, damned-near-unlimited possibilities of being a car owner after all this time. No more waiting in the winter dark on freezing cold, wet, windy street corners for an inevitably LATE Trimet bus! No more begging trips to the store from generous and kind, but busy! friends or having to pay a cabbie, no more (im)patient waits for invitations to the coast, declining invitations, or missing opportunities or classes because transportation wasn't possible. No more terrorizing rides with crazed poet drivers ever again either! :) No more hauling groceries home on my back, bags balanced on my shoulders, or pulling my little cart for a mile from Fred Meyer. ...sigh...

Yes, it's a late model, low-miles used import, but it has an automatic transmission for a luxurious change, a spacious trunk and gets pretty good mileage besides. AND it's a pretty color. I love that.

I promise to post a photo as soon as it stops raining long enough! I'm still working on getting my daughter to let me take a preggie portrait. More on that and her famous shyness later. She isn't due until spring so there's still time.

Last weekend my younger sister came to Portland and stayed with me while visiting her daughter (my niece), Tegan who's a student at Portland State. Marcie and I haven't spent extended time together since before she was married almost 30 years ago! It was a wonderful visit and we talked and talked about our parents and our own parenting and just families in general. Revelatory and validating at the same time. I'm hoping we'll all be getting together more regularly now Tegan lives here. It was just so much fun.

Marcie and Tegan made dinner for one of the nights of the visit. Spaghetti--Tegan's favorite. Well, it's kind of a Boykin favorite all around. Here they are at my stove:

Yes, it's true that all of the women in my family are great beauties--combined with our dazzling intellects and unfailing social grace, we are formidable. It's a curse.

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Doc's older brother, Raymond arrived a few weeks ago for a short visit and Doc requested a portrait at an old landmark downtown--where the McBride boys posed for an Easter Sunday shot in their matching sailor suits sometime in the late 1940s. It was a total hoot to shoot them together with their matching grey beards this time. Doc is in green, Ray in blue.

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Last Sunday night I celebrated the release of Night Bomb 2, a poetry anthology published by friends, Chris and Amber Ridenour. One of my recent poems is included and they will also be publishing my book, "Creosote" next. Anyway, I also celebrated the "opening" of my first photo show at World Cup Coffee at the same event! Here is a shot of a wall of my own photos taken that night! It was pretty damned fine fun to get to say I was the one who took those photographs. I'm really pleased with the way it all came together.

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Also recently I got to do some portrait work for my friend and coworker, Cherise to help with her modeling portfolio--how cool is that?! Here are a few of my favorites. Speaking of beauties...

And now here's the new stuff

These shots are from the Stenzel Healing Garden at Good Samaritan Hospital in NW Portland. I shoot a lot here because it's convenient as well as beautiful. I'm thinking of putting a small book together for patients who can't get outside. What do you think?

finishing up other stuff before getting to the new stuff

I love poppies for their slutty bright colors, but even more for the seed pods they leave behind.

Not sure if it's my age, or just what is happening to me, but I simply adore dried-up grasses and dying blossoms, and could shoot and admire these natural deconstructions endlessly. Fall is coming.

grumpy nuns

I can relate. Tending toward the grumpishness myself, nevertheless, it's a little inhibiting to live next door to so many of the disapproving old girls, emphatically closing their windows whenever my friends and I hold forth on my cozy little balcony on warm days and the occasional evening.

Okay, we cuss and some of my friends smoke. I can see how it could make the nuns uncomfortable. And maybe the day I shot a nude model reclining on the stovetop and the kitchen window was open for the light, could have been a bit startling if they were looking that direction, I guess.

But I'm consistently friendly, and until it became obvious even to me that my overtures were unwelcome, I'd wave from the window in daily morning greeting--as we tend to open the blinds nearly simultaneously. Our schedules are quite similar, it seems.

So yesterday when I was enthusiastically shooting the prolific curbside garden that the old girls planted and tend daily, and the perfect light was fading quickly, one of the crusty dears approached me briskly, demanding to know what I was taking pictures of--the lens was trained on the stone wall in front of their annex, so to capture the light on the dry, bare branches of an ancient, damned near dead, arborvitae.

I told her what I was shooting and she was nonplussed. I was taking pictures of the light on that ugly old bush? So I offered to show her what else I'd captured of the vivid cosmos, zinnias, hydrangea, etc. in the parking strip, and she skeptically watched me scroll though the images on my camera's LED. Unimpressed, she harrrumphed, and walked away suggesting that I try to shoot the dahlias instead. Yeah. The dahlias. How obvious.

and again with the flowers and gardens

it's one of the things that makes me interesting

I love to shoot portraits and nudes. Not necessarily at the same time.

roomies

They've been so good all summer, barely a complaint about the heat or occasional irregularities in their meal schedule (I plead the fifth on that count), but the other day when I finally noticed that their water bottle was bone dry, they didn't even squeak an accusatory insult in my direction!

After refilling the bottle, I watched poor Trudy suck on that thing for a full five minutes, and I promised from now on to always check it before I leave for work in the morning. Sheesh.

go toward the light

Spent yesterday morning in lovely rooms around Portland's eastside with a favorite companion who shares my enthusiasm for vintage sparklies--Miss J Purcell. Here are a few samples from the Sapphire Hotel, Bella Norte and Flutter.