In Search of Smew

Life as a Hedge Knight

2008-09-21T21:17:00.000-07:00

The Shrewsbury Faire, Oregon's most extravagant Rennaisance Faire, was a festive gathering featuring medieval costumery, jugglers, and jousters. It was also a great excuse to grow another chia sproutfit.

These kids had a hundred questions about how I grow sproutfits....and why. Tea Leaf leis supplied by my mother and sister in Hawaii added that extra something to the costume.

A woman in late medieval garb telling me she has never seen anything so green and bushy.
I encountered this mild-mannered woodsman on a forest trail as I made my way toward the tournament joust.
Do you know how many Chia Pets I had to kill to make this costume? Frequent watering is required to keep the sprouts perky in direct sunlight. I was sadly withered by the end of the day. But by then I had proved my point...whatever that point may have been.

The Mad Rooster

2008-09-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

Wooohoo! I love a parade! Especially one featuring a bunch of co-op members dressed as funky chickens dancing to an endless loop recording of our favorite chicken tunes. Here are some pictures of our float from this year's Newport Loyalty Days Parade.
Doug was absolutely on fire as The Mad Rooster: sprinting, leaping, throwing candy, doing push-ups and dancing with the cheering onlookers. It was non-stop entertainment until he collapsed in the back of the pick-up/float.

Linda, as Yolkana White, had a more subtle approach to candy distribution. At times, stopping to briefly talk to kids or to lay an egg.

The odd assortment of costumes include a large quantity of paper mache and feathers. The float was decked out with Lucky Cluck banners on all sides.

Fred Meyer Bear can join our float anytime.

The Lucky Cluckers finished the parade with a "Special Merit" Ribbon and a very tired, sweaty, Mad Rooster.

My first visit to the Oregon Country Fair

2008-07-15T00:57:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it! My last three posts all show me in chia "sproutfits." I guess wearing chia is the only thing that can inspire me to create a post. I should change the name of this blog to "Adventures in Chia."

"Garf" the Caveman joined me along with his massive club. Amy is on fire in her red dress, and Eli is "Tangled Up In Blue."
Being covered with greenery lended itself to the organic nature of the event.
The Country Fair is a joyous freak show featuring a dizzying and non-stop array of performances, food, crafts and parades. The sproutfit was defiantly a big hit! One of the most memorable moments was when the parade of drumming dirt people stopped their procession, surrounded me and started stroking every inch of my greenery. It was overwhelming and kind of freaky. I was petted throughout the day, but these folks really messed up my chia by rubbing their painted selves up against me.
Am I done with chia? Certainly not. Today I did two paintings detailing a much more elaborate and ambitious chia costume for next year.

The Games of the Second Laugh Olympiad

2008-02-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

This year's Laugh Olympics proved a hotly contested and slightly bizarre series of events. Unlike last year, with an early winner, the second Laugh Olympics went down to the last event and the announcement of the final winner was a surprise to some.
I tried to take the chia sproutfit to its ridiculous extreme by covering a full-body stocking with the stuff. This difficult attempt proved only moderately successful. It was very difficult to get my body into this thing (through the neck hole) and the contorted efforts resulted in big rips in the suit and patches of chai falling off. People assured me that the rips and missing chunks only enhanced the effect. Maybe, but I would have preferred to have a sharp respectable-looking chia body suit.
The rub-a-dub contest was one of 15 events. It provided some of the better photo ops. Contestants were supplied with a bucket of water and a bar of soap. The victor was the one who used up the most soap in 3 minutes. The controversial winner was actually a woman (not pictured) who cleaned up using an impressive 35g of soap. Runner up when to Brendan, on the right, who used 34g. I am ashamed to say in my test run I only managed 19g. Outkast's tune "So Fresh and Clean" was blasted from deck speakers to add to the overall effect.

My brother's team, the Urohawks, came out with a very narrow win over the Lucky Cluckers, who seem to come in second at every event even though they deserve a victory.

I admit that the day after the Laugh Olympics I brainstormed a list of events for next year...and even wrote a whole a round of "Jeopardy" to use as one of the contests.

"Blast from the Past" Prom

2008-02-26T08:46:00.000-08:00

Here Anne and Fran pose in front of their historic photos. This event was all about flashing back to high school, and having a better time than we did then. That was easily achieved.
Anne's wig was well-circulated.
Doug go into a spontanious and intense dance-off with a white-clad stranger. Came out on top after some athletic ground moves.
I debuted my new fashion statement: wearable chia sproutfits.

Dirty dog, I had two dates for the Prom. Here I am with one of them: a disembodied torso named "Candy." My other date was a talking ape named "Bonkers." So yes, it reminded me of high school, but was more fun.

The 2007 Chicken Party

2008-02-26T08:28:00.000-08:00

Well, I am about a year behind on this Blog, but hopefully I can redeem myself by making a few entries here. I should at least attempt to cover the major party events. Lets start with the annual "Chicken Party." Here we see Doug, Luke and I about to unveil the new chicken label.
Becca shows off the new label that prominently features her chicken's fluffiest parts.
Dawn with Yolkanna White, the fabulous hostess for "Chicken Jeopardy."
Here we are in the midst of "Chicken Jeopardy" a heated contest that was decided in the final jeopardy round.

The evening ended with the game "Cock Twister."

The Quest for the Amber Starglass

2007-04-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

Here we see Kalijanga sparing with Garfe before the Quest for the Amber Starglass begins. The epic struggle saw three teams of freakish birds, beasts, humanoids and monsters go head to head against each other and the powerful guardians of the Starglass. Combatants went through trials of strength, spirit and intellect as they raced to lay hands on the talisman and consume the blessing therein.

Kalijanga shape shifts to human form and takes on a barbaric viking after stealing his helmet.

Garfe being very cave-man like, throwing big rocks.

Uri sheds his 70's Street Pimp garb to toss a rock. If you click on this picture you'll get a look at a face reminiscent of a psychotic rabbit.

The three-way tug-a-war left the victor with the legendary Horn of Valir.

Karen spent several events on Brendan.

The Oracle, Shea'arendril and Kalijanga, Children of Twilight, guided the hordes through the many challenges of the day.

I don't have time to blog!

2007-04-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

I am going to attempt to resurrect this blog after ignoring it for several months. I have had too many projects going lately!

Birthday Smack-down

2006-11-19T17:40:00.000-08:00

I love a good pinata. They have so much to offer, particularly if you make them yourself. The planning phase allows the maker to explore latent violent tendencies. You ask yourself what would I like to hit with a stick? The construction phase features the wonderfully messy, gooey, sticky process of paper mache over some form of crude structure. Very tactile. Then there is the fun of deciding what to put in the piñata. It’s not just about candy anymore. Any number of oddities, from the delightful to the puzzling, may be included. The destruction of the piñata can be as satisfying as the creation. It affords the opportunity to hit something with a stick. In our society, outside of baseball, this behavior is generally discouraged. Some might also relish the mystery of what is inside the cavernous wrapper of rigid paper and paint. Then there is the competitive aspect of trying to make solid contact with the piñata, and the mad grab for the contents when it falls out.

So, when it came time for Khem and Emily’s join birthday party I didn’t make a piñata. I made two. How could I resist?

Here is Becca hitting the cat piñata with a canoe paddle. I made this one a bit too sturdy and the stick I brought fell apart before the piñata. I’ll note that that this wasn’t an attack on cats in general but rather the sinister feline that attacked and nearly killed my beloved chicken, Penny. Some of her real feathers were coming out if the figure’s mouth. Everyone wanted a whack at W. Here a party-goer dispenses with the stick and does a Karate Kid to the already-battered figure of our 43rd. I believe the piñata lost a leg from this blow.

Of course this birthday party featured a great deal more than a couple of piñata. Everyone had something to contribute. For example, Becca was on margarita duty all evening and Dawn provided the plush “girlfriend” pictured below as a gift to Khem. People enjoyed the oddly dismembered torso throughout the night.

"The Nettles", a fiddle and guitar combo, provided wonderful music to sing and dance to. After that, others stepped forward to share their vocal talent on karaoke. The sharing went on until the wee hours of the morning at which time Amanda provided a mountain of the decedent Scandinavian aebleskyvers for all to enjoy.

Ent wakes up and finds he is strong

2006-10-29T20:39:00.000-08:00

A group of Halloween freaks took Newport by storm this Saturday. Lets take a look.

Khem, Amanda and Beca as a fabulous glittering threesome.

I stood in as the ent "Treebeard", a bulky, imposing tree-hearder covered entirely with real mosses, lichens, mushrooms, branches, and bark. The lavish costume's massive false head also featured two painted ping-pong balls as haunting orange eyeballs. We started the evening with the throng at the Oregon Coast Aquarium's "Creatures of the Night." The Ent left the event with a lovely gift basket as a first-place prize.

The very heavy, woody ent costume required a nerd, a copweb and a street walker as full-time support staff. One important function was to pick up pieces of me as the mob of touchy-feely revelers stroked my mosses, lichens and other parts.

Treebeard and the Golden Eagle tied for first place at the Rogue Brewery's costume contest. Both costumes were very engaging but the Eagle garnered louder and luder applause due to her vastly greater sex appeal.

Earl and Pearl, retirees from arid Arizona, had never seen such excessive mossy growth.

By the end of the night I had lost large quantities of mossy debris, several fingers, a mushroom, auxillary branches and my pants. The weighty trousers migrated downward thoughout the evening. I'll be regrowing parts before the Ent appears again later in the week.

The Truimph and Tragedy of Super Fred Meyer

2006-10-29T20:24:00.000-08:00

Khem So, mild-mannered civil servant, made a sudden transformation into SUPER FRED MEYER this Friday. The heroic patron of One-Stop-Shopping fearlessly defended Fred Meyer stores across the Northwest until he ripped his crotch. The hero then re-appeared in my living room as a man in plastic shopping bags and a Mexican fighting mask. We continued our preparations for Saturday’s Halloween Festivities.

Only on St. George!

2006-09-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

Here is my top ten list of things unique to the St. George experience:

1. Kids breaking into the bunkhouse through a blubber shoot. When confronted one adolescent admitted to stealing my toothpicks and a calculator.

2. The most magnificent racks in the world. The reindeer here hold all the world records for the species.

3. A seal running a marathon. No, wait that’s me, dressed as a seal.

4. 800, 000 buckets of birds. Calculated at 4 seabirds per standard 5 gallon bucket.

5. 300 foxes and no dogs. Domestic canines are not allowed because of potential for rookery disturbance and disease transmission to seals.

6. Fewer trucks running than not. Oops, my mistake. That’s true for every village in
Alaska.

7. A jail with no jailor. With no police, Justice of the Peace or other authorities on the island our big, beautiful new jail seems unlikely to be used. .

8. Vacuum-packed pets. Udu stores her dead, packaged pets in the freezer.

9. Walk-around barb wire fence. This must be used to keep out the completely stupid. The fence was up for a while before the barb wire was added.

10. Poochki, Choochki and Gavirooshki for dinner. That’s what the locals would call wild celery, Least Auklet and Red-legged Kittiwake. And yes, they eat all three regularly.

The Gift of the Gurge

2006-08-25T17:22:00.000-07:00

The other day a kittiwake chick pucked all over my leg. I was ecstatic! The regurgitation contained a bunch of fish eggs. I had never seen a single fish egg in a gurg, let alone this amazing quantity. I couldn’t wait to tell everyone.

Yes, this is the type of thing we talk about over dinner out on St. George Island.

I’m continuing the annual kittiwake chick growth study and, well, it can be a messy job. We make the rounds of weighing and measuring a set of 40 chicks every 4th day. The purpose is to get growth rates and collect gurges for diet analysis.

The first step in this process is to don a climbing helmet and “special” set of rain gear that I wear just for doing chick growth. I also call it “The Stink Suit,” for obvious reasons. The chicks will puck and poo on me with reckless abandon. I take an extension ladder and head for the bird nesting cliffs. I usually have one person with me to hold the ladder when I climb up to the chicks. Then it is wobble bobble over snot rocks and up and down the shaky ladder with pockets and handfuls of birds.

This can be a dicey operation. The ground is uneven, rocky and slick with a combination of wetness, sea slime and bird shit. The situation can be a bit shaky below…and above. The cliffs are rather crumbly, you see. I don’t know which job is more dicey, climbing the ladder or holding it from below, dodging falling rocks.

Almost without fail when I grab a chick it releases a squirt of excrement. You would think by now I would know how to avoid this, but no. My chest is always covered with white streaks. Sometime during the weighing and measure the bird usually gives a high pitches, urgent call. I know what is coming. If I am lucky I get my hand out in time to catch the gurge. If it falls elsewhere it is harder to collect. Of course, the dream is always to get the chick to gurge directly into a collection bag, but that almost never works out.

Later that day, usually sometime after midnight, I process the gurges as shown in this picture. If you look closely you may be able to find the one with the entirely intact baby octopus. Another first this year and, yes, another great dinner conversation in the making.

Fecundity is Fun!

2006-08-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

I love chicks. Everyone knows this. That is why I am delighted to report that I have squeezed many this summer.

Biology types are always saying kittiwakes are “boom or bust” breeders. Don’t believe it. My experience is that they are usually neither. This year, for example, is a mixed bag. Some plots are dripping with chicks while others have nothing to show but fading streaks of white poo. Still, any time you can get a picture of four fledging-age chicks in one frame you can’t call it a “bust.”

This relatively high fecundity has lead to a successful chick growth study. Today I realized that I am pretty much done with this study, so I reflect on my month and a half of squeezing chickens.

It was very rewarding to see so many chicks reach fledging age. I enjoy watching them grow up. The young chicks are, well, there really is no word for them but “cute.” Then they go through quite an awkward stage. They are gawky and messy, covered with feather dandruff and other birds’ excrement, unsightly feathers poking through damp matted down. Just when you think they can’t get any worse-looking they become beautiful. The last of the down is replaced by sleek contour feathers as the birds reach an age where they can properly preen and keep themselves clean. Their large, dark eyes are enhanced by a gentle circle of black.

Today when I reached for the remaining chicks they flew away, ready to try the vastness of the non-nest world. I wish them well.

And by the way, we tend to call any hands-on work with large bird chicks “squeezing chickens.” I don’t know why. That’s just how it is.

Booty Haul

2006-08-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, beachcombing and chicken appreciation are two of my favorite hobbies. There are no chickens on the island, so I have concentrated on beachcombing this summer. And, without a doubt, this has been the finest season ever for collecting beach booty. Yes, this summer has even exceeded the famed spring of 2004 when I found my radiant and rare amethyst sphere and many other glass balls.

The booty is quite varied. Some handsomely net-covered glass floats have turned up this summer as well as large, colorful inflated buoys of exceptional character and flair. As usual I have gathered a large collection of colorful pebbles to bring home and use in mosaics. The marine mammal remains, though, set this season apart.

Many of you have already heard about the walrus skull. The tusks of which are still under negotiation. It was quite a massive creature! This animal died fairly recently. I went through quite a long and stinky process of boiling and scraping the meat off it. Sound gross? That’s because it was.

Did I mention that I have a penis bone? I do. I have gathered a handsome collection of petrified seal and sea lion bones. These will serve various utilitarian purposes around the house. Sort of like on the Flintstones. The glory of this boney group is a perfectly-preserved penis bone. I think that one will just be for display.

Then there are the 2000-year-old seal and sea lion teeth. My obsession. I had never found one before this summer! One beach on St. George is adjacent to a bog. Bogs are excellent for preserving artifacts. The acidic soils erode under the pounding surf and the mighty Bering Sea tosses the treasure back onto St. George’s expectant shores. They are pure ivory. These ancient relics display a remarkable variation of size, texture, color and pattern.

What a haul! And that is not even including the items I have not mentioned due to questionable legality.

Flogged by Fog

2006-08-22T10:24:00.000-07:00

May and June were peaches and cream. Sunshine, blue skies, movie stars. Apparently it’s payback time. We are experiencing the foggiest August in memory.

Well, so what? So it’s foggy. What’s the big deal? I’ll tell you.

Fog really makes work out here much more difficult. You see, most of my work requires seeing. I follow plots of cliff-nesting seabirds through the season. Sometimes it is so foggy I can’t see the cliffs, let alone the birds. So when it’s that foggy I can just stay home and play parcheezi and eat eggs right? Wrong. Generally, I go out anyway and wait for the fog to clear. And I struggle to see what’s going on. And then I wait some more. And struggle some more. Looking at a nest on a clear day I note that the adult kittiwake has a chick. The chick still has its egg-tooth and a slightly bluish hue to its eyes. In the fog sit there asking myself if the bird is standing or sitting or if it is even a kittiwake.

In the fog I am often in the company of stranded travelers. Planes aren’t able to land when it is foggy so it is common for people to get stuck out here. We haven’t had a scheduled flight land for 18 days. Stranded people tend to be grumpy people. The daily ritual for such travelers goes like this. Get up, listening to the automated weather report from the airport. Here that it is foggy. Listen to it 10 times more, noting slight variations in ceiling height and visibility. Call Pen Air and hear that the plane is on weather delay. Drive to the airport and check your baggage anyway. Wait some more. Hear that the flight is canceled. Pick up luggage and wait to do it again the next day.

And of course no planes means no food or mail as well. After a couple weeks the store shelves start to look rather bare. Note this freezer from earlier today. It features a few half gallons of ultra-pasturized milk and a box of moldy lemons. I suppose we can avoid contracting scurvy by sucking lemons. That’s something.

Limping toward the end of the season.

2006-08-18T18:03:00.000-07:00

Mid August on the Pribilofs. Time to wind down and relax a little. Or not. It is hard to relax when coming face to face with a bull fur seal.

Even outside the rookeries, we unwary biology types often stumble across the occasional outcast fur seal hauled up on the rocky shore. You see, seals blend in amazingly well with stones. Occasionally a seal pops up from nowhere. Both seal and human get startled. The seal generally moves toward the ocean and the person moves up toward the cliffs. No big deal.

My encounter last week, however, had a different tone. I was strolling down the beach when I heard a bellow. Turning, I was looking directly into the mouth of an angry fur seal. I was between the seal and its escape rout to the sea. According to Rachel it was 1-2 feet from my face. I ran. I ran faster than most people are accustomed to seeing me move this fast... a bad idea over big, slick, rocks. I felt a sharp pain in my knee and crumbled into a heap, hoping I was far enough from the ravishing seal to avoid being lacerated.

Now as some of you know, I am the last man standing out here. Fish and Wildlife Service started with three people out here. One quit and one left, ironically, with a knee injury. As I sat there clutching my knee I was thinking "Maybe this field season was not meant to happen."

So now I am limping toward the end of the season. Don't worry, I'll make it.