The Summer of 2019

The summer of 2019

After a spring with much travel I did spend most of the summer close to home enjoying friends and doing long and short day trips. I did a lot of bird watching because that is what I always do. I haven’t written about them in a long while so I’ll add to that blog soon. In short I did any new birds during the season but have seen some nice ones in new settings but that will all be in cyber print soon.

I created a few projects for myself during the summer one of which was to go to as many festivalsand Farmer’s Markets as I reasonably could. My goal was to something of a personal assessment of the event with highs and lows. I also thought a lot about the social meaning of each. I put all the details in the link above for anyone interested in reading about them.

I spent a lot of time in museums, art galleries and historic sites. Portland has a superior Art Museum and with an annual membership I was able to go several times and see every current exhibit. I enjoyed the one about the International Exposition in Paris in 1900. I could not help but to notice that the various posters and other advertisements for it were widely representative of the ethnicities of the world.

I liked the exhibit called Prints for the People even better. It was a showing of works done for the Associated American Artists that existed from 1934 until 2000. As one might imagine it included many WPA works and in a nutshell was a series of images that I think I can call American Social Realism. They depicted workers, desolate settings and American lives of the working class and poor. The most famous of the artists was Thomas Hart Benton who I have enjoyed and studied some over the last 10 years. There were many others as well.

Vancouver and the surrounding Clark County as well as Portland is very art heavy with galleries teeming. I go at least once a week to some of them. I am not much into abstract art or folk art and while those are bountiful here I don’t spend much time with them. There are a lot of nature artists which I really enjoy though I have yet to see any paintings of flowers that have a pollinator in them plying their mutually beneficial trade. Anyway I have been making my photography more creative as a result of experiences in visual art. Almost all of my flower photos do have pollinators in them.

I also belong to the Oregon and Washington Historical Societies. As with the Art Museum I go to the Oregon society museum in Portland routinely so that I do not miss an exhibit. I have not used their library yet but have an itch to read about labor history in this very industrial town and plan on looking at some archival material there.

History Museum-Portland-with the Tromp-l'oeil design

The two main exhibits during the summer were about craft brewing (beer) in Oregon and The Beatles first visit to Portland in 1965. They were both very well done but I enjoyed the former better than the latter. However the Beatles exhibit evoked more personal memories than the beer history. I think it was because I was a young teenager first experiencing things like rock and roll, clothing styles and cars when Beatlemania made the scene.

Washington Historical Museum

Behind the museum is a bridge that displays a tremendous amount of glass art. I asked around about any known connection between Tacoma and glass art historically (like Toledo, Ohio and all of the auto glass history that employed many for years) but no one that I talked to was aware of any. However the “Glass Bridge” was pretty attractive to the eyes.

Glass

I also went to the Washington Historical Museum in one of my few trips and wrote about that as well as a visit to Ft. Clatsop and the Columbia River Historical Museum and wrote about them in the blogabout my trips.

I also have more time in retirement to analyze baseball. Not the game or statistics and stars but on the societal impact of the game as seen in the fans, stadium architecture and behind the scene workers. I avoid the major leagues and focus on minor leagues, the lower level the better. I actually wanted to study what I called “Prole” sports when I began graduate school but was dissuaded from that avenue, which is a minor regret. Anyway I went to a couple of games this year and wrote a brief story about them in anotherblog.

Tomato Plant July 4

As almost every year I planted a garden full of herbs, tomatoes and peppers. The tomatoes yielded about 10-12 fruits. Not many but the ones that I did harvest were pretty good. The cilantro and basil provided nearly a perfect amount of spices which is much less than in a normal year. The peppers yielded almost nothing at all. I do have several small and unripe jalapenos on the vine and I’ll leave them be in order to see what might happen during the fall. The Serrano have a couple of l fruits growing and the fish peppers never even had a flower. I don’t know the cause of such a poor harvest but think it may be as simple as not enough light. Next year I’ll probably just grow flowers.

The weather here during the summer was a little milder than my first two in the Northwest. There was a little bit more rain but the differences have not been real sharp.

Serratt cluster

Here is the parking lot during a summer storm

I probably did something else this summer.