The Story of Lily and the Table

A couple of weeks ago I found a really ugly black table at a Relay for Life yard sale for $1. I could tell it was real wood and decided to take it home for my first refinishing project.

Lily, the puppy at my house, thought she was helping by dropping her slobbery rawhide chew bones and various other toys and sticks on my table as I was trying to sand it, after all I was on her back porch. But, hey, she is a good model to make up for it.

There (Victoria) and Back Again

I just got back from another amazing Power Girls vacation (a long story) to Victoria, BC, Seattle, and the Portland area. First we took a high-speed ferry from Seattle to Victoria. Although, my mom said its grandeur and speed paled in comparison to a high-speed ferry she had taken from Sweden to Denmark, it was still pretty cool. I was shocked to learn that the boat was burning 250 gallons of fuel per hour! But once you divide that by the 200 people on board the boat and compare it to how much fuel it would have taken to individually drive there… it all makes sense.

The Seattle Skyline

Once in Victoria and once through Canadian customs, we slowly dragged our suitcases the two blocks to our hotel. But we didn’t realize our hotel was right across the street from… THE Thunderbird Park. We were shocked to find the carving studio, which had been used for 25 years, was being dismantled. We stopped to take pictures of the half-gone building and it’s massive ceiling beams, little knowing that by the time we walked by again at 9 am the next morning, that it would be almost completely gone, and that by the end of our stay, the only thing left of the building would be it’s floor and a Haida totem pole that had marked the entrance.

Thunderbird Park is full of totem poles!

What was left of the carving studio...

Thunderbird Park is the Royal British Columbia Museum’s outdoor totem pole exhibit. Most of the poles are replicas of originals that are now in storage or inside the museum to be preserved. One of the most intriguing parts of Thunderbird Park for us was this huge Kwakiutl long house replica… that we couldn’t get in! One evening, on a whim, I stuck my eye between two of the house boards, and what I saw was amazing. I could see a painted dance screen and two totem poles with wide wings flanking a stage. I moved to the other side of the building and looked in again. There were two massive totem poles flanking (and probably guarding) the entrance. Needless to say, this activity kept us entertained for some time and we walked away feeling like we had discovered the dusty artifacts ourselves, which was almost better than being let into the house on a museum tour.

We spent another three days on Vancouver Island; first exploring the city itself; the waterfront, Chinatown, Beacon Hill Park, the beaches along the Juan de Fuca Strait, the Royal BC Museum. On the third day we rented a car and drove up the coast to Duncan, the city of totem poles and Chemanius, the city of murals, with several scenic detours.

A viewpoint on the Vancouver Island drive

Perhaps the highlight of this detour up the coast was hiking out to Kinsol Trestle. This precarious looking bridge was part of the Trans-Canadian hiking trail before it was set on fire. Imagine, walking across that 600+ foot bridge, 125 feet above the rocky river, with no railings, and huge gaps between the wood beams… I have a feeling this is one thing that would not have been allowed in the US. Now that the bridge is condemned, hikers have to take an 8.5 km detour to continue on their hike.

Kinsol Trestle: would you walk across that?

Once back in Seattle, and through US customs, we explored Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, the Klondike Gold Rush Museum, Chinatown, and did lots of antique shopping. On Sunday, we spent the day in Fremont at the Summer Solstice Festival, and doing more vintage store and antique store shopping (of course). There was so much fun stuff to do at the festival. We rummaged through 2/$10 boxes of awesome silk skirts, dresses, and tops made from old saris, took a free yoga class, marveled at extravagant “art cars,” and sat down and made collages from 1930s-1940s era National Geographics.

We saw a submarine in Puget Sound on the way back to Seattle.

An idea of what you find at Pike Place Market

What I mean by "art cars"

Sadly, the next day we headed south again. We stopped in Olympia for (more antique shopping) lunch at Spar Café (a McMenamin’s establishment) and over a delicious veggie burger and hummus plate decided to go to Multnomah Falls and then spend the evening at McMenamin’s Edgefield. Edgefield was set on the property of an old “poor farm” and had everything one could want: a hotel, spa and soaking pool, 3 restaurants, brewery, distillery, winery, golf course, glass blower, pool hall, vineyards. What a beautiful place, I can’t wait to go back and do more.

I guess that is the downside of vacations, you rarely are able to completely explore the place you have gone to visit, and have in the process, discovered other places you want to come back to and explore more. But would I stop going on vacations because of that? Never!

More photos are on my flickr page, although more will be updated in July (already reached my June quota).

Rainwater As Art

I just got back from an amazing rain gardens training. When editing my "Stormwater Best Management Practices for Coos Watershed Residents: Every-day Things You Can Do to Keep Coos Bay Clean" (which will be unveiled tonight at the first Lower Isthmus Slough Coffee Klatch meeting) today I noticed I already had a better grasp on how to communicate about some of these ideas. I could really see myself being passionate about stormwater remediation techniques for the rest of my life.

The training was taught by several Oregon State University extension officers in conjunction with Sea Grant and the Oregon Environmental Council. First we learned the definition of a rain garden (a sunken garden bed, or landscape depression, that collects and treats stormwater runoff from rooftops, driveways, sidewalks, parking lots, and streets), and how they function. Then we went outside and did actual site assessment activities for possible rain garden sites on the Lane Community College campus. We tested the percolation rate of the soil (0.5 - 2"/hr is ideal) and noted clay layers (a no-no), measured slope of the site (stay away from slopes 10 degrees or steeper), calculated roof area (rule of thumb: your rain garden should be 10% of the area of impervious surface it will be draining), analyzed what parts of the roof drained to which downspouts, and talked about other constraints on rain garden siting.

After lunch, we broke into groups and started designing rain gardens for different possible sites around the building we had evaluated. We had to adhere to pullbacks (i.e. 10 feet from foundations, 5 feet from sidewalks, etc.), consider sun aspect, aesthetic appeal, conveyance of the water from the downspout to the rain garden, where the outflow will be, what plants to plant where, and so much more.

I have identified a site around the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology's parking lot as a possible rain garden site. It is already a vegetated swale (a grassy depression with no curbs that allows runoff to naturally infiltrate) but it could be a beautiful and education rain garden if we just went in and added selected plants: water-loving plants in the bottom, mesic plants on the slopes, etc. Other highlights include (1) it is privately owned, therefore fewer people I would have to talk to, fewer permits, etc. (2) it would be a great spot to also have an interpretive sign about rain gardens because it is a highly visible, high-traffic spot, and (3) they have already indicated a desire to be eco-friendly by designing a vegetated swale to begin with, I just need to help them take that extra step to make it a rain garden. Stay posted on this idea!

Big Day for the CoosWA Website

Today I posted the June newsletter for the Coos Watershed Association (3 pages!). I am really excited about this publication, and hope it gets others excited about watershed protection too.

Other new webpages this week: http://www.cooswatershed.org/knotweed.html (a new Knotweed Resource Page about two very invasive plants in the Coos watershed with lots of great pictures and other resources), http://www.cooswatershed.org/isthmus_coffee_klatch_2009.html (a new page all about the Isthmus Assessment that is starting this summer and the first round of Coffee Klatch meetings that are starting this month), and http://www.cooswatershed.org/staff.html (now has clickable links to individual biographies for each staff member).

Now I’m off to practice my presentation for the Sunrise Rotary Club tomorrow (maybe I should have practiced getting up at 6 am too…).

My First TV Appearance

This is a funny story. So, I had less than a week to prepare for an interview with the local TV station about the hazardous waste collection event last weekend. I took the reporter out to a local landowner’s property where expired, illegal, and unneeded hazardous chemicals filled the tractor shed and greenhouse. When I met the reporter at the TV station, she didn’t bring a video crew with her so I was thinking “Yes! She isn’t going to actually video tape me.” But then we get to the site and she pulls out a camera, tripod, and microphone (“Oh no! Where are my notes?”).

Later that day she posted the story on the website but there was no video with it, so I’m thinking, “Gahh, I must have been that bad on camera that she didn’t post a video at all. Oh well, that’s a relief…” But then I heard from a lady at The Nut Farmer stand at the mall (where I was hosting an awareness campaign last weekend) that CoosWA was on the news the previous evening. So I zoom over to the KCBY website and sure enough, they did make a video! But hey, I look pretty good.

The full article is here. Click on the video icon under the photo to watch the video in a separate window.