Weekend Tidbits

I love Oregon, I love Florence, darnmit I just love life. This past weekend was the 13th annual Florence Home & Garden Show. It’s an event that my boss started, duh, 13 years ago. A small to-do that draws vendors from across the state and always offers the inspiration to kick start my gardening season. This year I bought pots from down under – way kewl, one for me, my mom, and my sister-in-law’s birthday next week.

You know my dear, dumb dog is a retaliatory pisser. There is no other way to say it. So I always worry about odors between carpet shampooing every four to six months. I bought an Eco egg. That’s my name for it at least, so far so good. It’s a little oval plug in thingie that whirls quietly purifying my living room air. I smell something I can’t put my finger on, but it’s not my dog or vacuum cleaner. Possibly $50 well spent, time will tell.

One of my clients for the Home and Garden show is a little nursery south of town that specializes in Rhododendrons (the city’s blossom of choice,) Azaleas, and their companion plants – that includes Camilla bushes. My mom bought me one years ago, which I promptly killed in ignorance. I’ve no clue why it died but I’ve always wanted one since. So I spent $20 and bought this beauty. One of my few warm memories of my grand mother was the water bowls of floating Camillas she had all over her house.

Florence has a few claims to fame: the movies Sometimes A Great Notion, Four Seasons, and portions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Five Easy Pieces we filmed here; we are home to one of the most photographed lighthouse in America, Heceta Head – a haunted one at that n(really it’s the Keeper’s House that is haunted.) And whales decide to beach themselves here on occasion, 41 in 1979 and of course the infamous exploding whale of 1970. So it was no surprise Friday night to find that a undersized, juvenile Fin whale was caught in the surf just north of Florence. My heart always breaks for whales. My love of cetaceans made me erroneously believe I would grow up to be a Marine Biologist (no one told me it would take eight years of zoology – and a boat load of money and ambition.)It was the dream that died right before the I’m going to be a professional dancer dream bit the big one.

Jonah (as he was named prior to his impromptu burial) Sunday morning was interned in an eleven foot deep trench on the beach below that haunted lighthouse, the third and final place the ocean brought him on his three day death trek. Marine Biologist from OSU took their tissue and organ samples to determine what killed him. Backhoes and bulldozers dug the trench and then rolled Jonah in. A wife of one of the crew created a make shift cross and quietly wished Jonah a happier afterlife.

And then it snowed.

Sith,
Cele