The plant in the first photo may not look like much, but it's very special. It's tall western penstemon (Penstemon hesperius), which only grows in about a half dozen locations in the Portland, #Oregon/Vancouver, #^Washington area -- and nowhere else in the world. This pestemon was thought to have gone extinct in the late 20th century, but it's turned out to be surprisingly tough. Even so, P hesperius is on the federal endangered species list.
The clouds were broody but not seriously so. They had considered an evening storm, but upon reflection, broke up to allow the last light of the day to shine through.
And it was dramatic, and emotive, and peaceful -- a quiet and contemplative way to enter into the night.
Now that the So. Willamette Valley of #Oregon has some decent sunlight, I took my new Sigma 70-300 Macro Zoom out for another test.
These are Currant Flowers (native plant) growing in our front yard.
F/32 at 1/250th, ISO 3200, Canon 6DM2, shutter priority, pattern metering.
Interesting that so far the lens is overexposing everything up close in macro, this was 1 1/3 stops down from what the meter said. Only post processing was a touch of sharpening.
Oregon has been struggling with a shortage of public defenders, forcing some people facing charges to represent themselves in court. After the state legislature voted to re-criminalize the possession of small amounts of illegal drugs, advocates say the public defender shortage is bound to get worse. Read more from Axios.
"A woman living under the crawl space of an Airbnb that she cleaned... At what point can we say the American dream has become a nightmare?"
"It’s mathematically impossible to pull yourself out of homelessness without help... It’s not the moral failing of the people who are unhoused; it’s the moral failing of this country."
Julie Akins, senior housing director at AllCare Health, journalist, and former mayor of Ashland, #Oregon
"A 2.5 million-acre swath of southern Oregon has been named the largest Dark Sky Sanctuary in the world.
The region, which on Monday was officially named the Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary, comprises the southeastern half of Lake County, including Hart Mountain, Lake Abert and Summer Lake."
The Oregon Coast Inspired the Novel ‘Dune.’ Does the Sci-Fi Tale Foreshadow Its Fate?
"In Herbert’s original “Dune” work, the dedication page reads “to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration.” Many scholars have taken these words to heart, extolling the nuggets of wisdom “Dune” can teach humanity about oil, geoengineering and climate change, reported Jess Romeo for JSTOR Daily in 2021.
But as far as the films go, not everyone agrees that these adaptations focus enough on the environmental issues that helped inspire them.
In an opinion article for Sierra Magazine, film critic Rebecca Long writes that both popular “Dune” movie series, including director David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation and Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” and “Dune 2,” films “downplay the novel’s environmental message and treat the book’s ecological themes as extraneous rather than essential.”
"The newspaper Willamette Week reports that Pho Gabo, a Portland Vietnamese restaurant, closed one of its locations because of complaints from an anonymous neighbor about the restaurant's smell.
'Due to the city’s and the neighborhood’s complaints about the smell of the food that we grill and the foods that we serve customers we are temporarily closing this location,' read a sign taped to Pho Gabo's door."
Electricity is a fantastic invention, and I certainly wouldn't want to go back to a life of candles and kerosene. But like any technology, it has its pitfalls, and one of them is that we forget what nature's night lights look like.
At the sea, under a full moon, the effect is magical.
Don't grab a grocery sack and clean out your extra canned goods. That seems noble in the moment, but really, if you weren't hungry for it, why assume someone is desperate enough to eat that flavor of whatever?
It's like people who donate old worn and torn up clothes to a clothing bank. That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Send them money. They can make those dollars stretch for a lot of families.