Rev. Melville T Wire - #1

BORING NOTICE - the following may bore many readers - BEWARE
Today (Oct 5th, 07) begins the first of many blogs on Melville T. Wire. Over the next few months, more postings will appear about this man, his art, his life and why this is important to me. There will be high resolution pictures of the works we have collected and many links to information available online. There will be pictures of Melville and his wife in our home, helping us celebrate family events. There will be references to other people's writings about him. If I am lucky enough, conversations might even begin with others who have even more to contribute.

A quick Google search for Melville T Wire gives only about 130 hits; Yahoo only shows 77 links. The biography at askart.com is quite incomplete, somewhat inaccurate. There is no entry (yet) in Wikipedia. It appears there is a gap. One of the outcomes of this work effort is to improve all sources of information about Melville T Wire.

An article about Melville in the Oregon Historical Society,Winter of 2004, has at least 34 references to other materials about Melville. This excellent article is a great introduction to the life and art of Melville and is one of the best places to begin. The authors, Ginny Allen and Gregory L Nelson, are both engaged in the discovery of Oregon historical art. They were instrumental in ensuring the first major art event honoring Melville Wire was a success. In 2005, the Willamette University Hallie Ford Museum of Art hosted a small exhibition of Melville Wire painting and it gave an excellent presentation of his life. It would be great to have that presentation be available through this blog.

Sometime between 2003 and 2004, Karen and I were browsing through the Portland Museum of Art. As we entered the area reserved for Northwest artists, the very first piece of art we saw- the first thing on the wall as we entered - was an etching by Melville Wire. I was so excited, I couldn't believe it at first. It was so cool! This was the first time I had seen something hung in a museum where I knew the artist and owned some of their works. Also we really value his work, especially the subject matter. It was that event that got us interested in Melville again.

More to come...

Bill's Bee Movie

The past two summers a neighbor has kept 24 of his hives on our property most of the summer. We have come to enjoy the free honey in the late fall, especially the Meadowfoam honey - that stuff is so good and so different tasting from other honeys we get locally. He comes and goes, checking on the bees each week until one day in the late fall when they leave to go live in California with the Almonds. Too bad Filberts don't need bees.


The bees have water at the hives but apparently not enough. Our large plastic dog bowl is always swarming with thirsty bees, looking for something to drink. They can easily drink a couple gallons a day and luckily for them, the faucet above the drinking bowl leaks. The water causes another problem for the bees though - a lot of them are not good swimmers. So Karen and I carefully place large sticks in the water, strategically so the bees can climb up on the stick from most anywhere in the bowl, dry off and fly away. The sticks kept disappearing though or being found a few feet from the bowl. We kept accusing the other of removing the stick until the night I spied the raccoon drinking from the same bowl. Aha! I'm pretty sure he had to use his paws to drink - they seem to do everything with their paws - and the consensus is that she was the one removing the stick almost every night.

I took a video of the bees and posted it to Google.

iPhone 1.1.1 - seems fine to me

Upgraded to 1.1.1 and all went fine for me - not so much for a lot of others apparently, especially those who customized their phone by jailbreaking it or siming it. I had done neither although I was about to go enjoy some of the 50 3rd party software out there, especially a task minder that sounded good and customizing the GUI by moving and replacing the buttons.

My 8gig works better than ever. The itunes button is awesome (like in Cool To Use, not like Beautiful) as I am so out of touch with newer music and this allows me to sample a whole boatload of different music styles whereever I can get wifi. It is so quick, even with out slow DSL at home. I click on a song and it IMMEDIATELY plays the first 30 seconds. So fast and so easy. I never really used an ipod much and find podcasts so enjoyable. The range of content is, well, global and the ease of listening will only get better when I get my headphones [Update: RIVET makes good headphones just for the iphone - jack plugs right in -10/11] for christmas (hint hint).

So I still love my iphone and still expect it to keep changing my life in subtle ways I did not expect. We now have all of our friends names and addresses and emails in one place instead of five which should help. It's not like we have hundreds of friends, but it is nice to know the number is bigger than 10.

What is my iphone? It is my watch, my camera, my phone, the home phone, my alarm clock, my light, my instant messager, my email box, my photo library, my movie library(I've watched Calum the Enchanter 15 times), my weather station, my maps, my friend finder, my radio, my link to music of all kinds, probably more that I can't think about. With all this, I find that I don't really want to show it off, as it's social patina is still too bright for a lot of people and it is still too much of a symbol of coolness.

45th and stable but the sun's in our eyes

If we didn't live on the 45th parallel, I swear these things would never happen. Well, especially in the midwest where the roads run on the compass.

We feel like we live on the 45th parallel even though we know it is at least 10 miles north of us per the sign on I-5. However it is so close that we can be fooled on certain days. Take the Monday morning in mid-September as I headed off to work. On that day, it really seemed like it was the 45th parallel here.

You see, the 4 lane road I sometimes use goes directly East - no, really really directly East. And my day got me to the roadway just as the sun had crossed the horizon, directly in my face.There was only about 2 degrees of difference between the sun and road way.

As I got closer to town and the sun got up a little higher, there really wasn't much to see but Mr. Sol. My assumption was the road had not changed and was still straight, so I watched my review mirror to make sure it was right behind me. Sure enough, it stayed there and I ended up in town.

Had we been on the 4oth or even the 42nd, the sun would have been at an angle and all would have been different. And the same thing happens at sunset on the road - sun directly in your eyes on the equinox, assuming the sky is not covered in clouds, like usual.

Oregon on the equinox - I still love it.

September brings new grandson video

Here's Calum using his feet as well as his hands - kind of monkey-like.

Click here to see Video on Google

That's it for now.

'nother iPhone Blog - something the world needs now

I got a cell phone finally. Big deal to me and maybe soon to others. Years have past since the first time I saw someone talking without wires and years since Karen got her cell phone. I was not going to have one. I would remain free of the tethering; free of the conversations with strangers; free of interruptions to conversations with people one can touch.

Of course all along it was a matter of time before some device came out that pegged me with it's ability to do all the things I need - all the things that make me go find a computer. Almost got hooked on the Treo but no, not quite enough. Then it was the whole blackberry family that looked appetizing. But with that one, the screen seemed so small and so were the buttons. It is a fine phone thought with lots and lots of 3rd party stuff.


Then one day, Alan came by and said I should watch the Annual Apple conference and Mr. Jobs demo'd the iphone. I was hooked - I knew it and could do nothing about it. The best resistance I mustered was to wait two weeks after the release before plunking done the dough. In some kind of frugal (and futile too) gesture, we decided to transfer our landline number to the iPhone. That sure had unexpected outcomes - more on that bout of 14 phone calls with Quest later.


Now I spend some of my evenings reading about iphones, playing with getting my contacts into groups, wishing I had some way to hook up the iphone to my Groupwise calendar at work and generally having a hell of a good time. Having the iphone made me discover:

• the wonderful world of podcasts
• the beauty of a movie on a 3" screen
• the awesomeness of having maps interact with the phone and the web
• the ability to listen to my old tapes, albums, CD, cassettes, etc at any time, anywhere
• watching stock pricess for the first time on a daily basis
• realizing that the weather in New Orleans really is horrible in the summer
• finding that I have phone numbers of over 200 people
• finding that when I put contacts into groups, I have over 34 friends (not so many really)
• texting for the first time and lovin it for it's simplicity and ease of use
• setting reminders every day to get myself on time
• etc, etc, etc

The most wondrous thing about the iphone is really the thing that any phone, even the "10 button just a dial tone phone for old people" has - a way to reach out to more people more often.

Perhaps this too was strange...

To get to the point of this short tale, you have to come along with me for a while and get a feeling for my day. It won't take long, as I seem to leave most of my stories between my brain and the keyboard, expecting the reader to fill in the missing pieces. Someday I will reread before publishing...


Anyway, the day started with rain and strong winds, making me glad that I had tarped my pickup before going in last night. It was jammed with booty for the dump. Everything from drywall to old shock absorbers to shreds of clothing worn by members of my family no longer living.


You see, there was this place in the family barn where my parents "put stuff". Yesterday was the 2nd stage of cleaning this area in anticipation of rebuilding this part of the barn. This part of the barn is fairly open to the elements but dry enough to stop most rot and allow only a little rust. It is the 2nd floor, kind of a mezzanine sort of affair. Unfortunately this area was also very open to someone tresspassing in our barn, something that a lot of cherry pickers and renters had done over the last few decades. So things got broken, disappeared and were scattered from their original boxes. No one seemed to care. This spring, as we looked through the contents, we only found junk - oh look, a whole album of 331/3 Sachmo records - only to find them all broken into many pieces. There was a very cool suitcase that bees had been living in for many years - it still remains in the barn and should be in a museum.


Anyway, almost all of that stuff got in the truck and today it was going to the Marion County dump. After arriving at the dump, while I was removing my tie downs and straps so I can remove the required tarp, I watched a middle-aged woman attempt to backup her SUV with a trailer full of trimmings. She was so not going to be successful. Oh so many people cannot back up - to me, it is not even nice to watch someone failing to backup, the suffering is so great. Just as I got my tarp off and was about to go offer my services, another gentleman offered assistance. And lordy, I don't think he had backed up anything before...


As I pulled out old stationary bikes, bike frames, broken pottery, shredded clothing and broken glass, there were no surprises (I had loaded it after all...), it was satisfying to throw them in the pit. The dry wall was on the bottom, beneath the 50# mirror that we got from Randall's dad, Lefty, for some reason. I had just got the last piece of drywall in the pit and was picking up pieces and a small picture frame came to my attention. It was about 2"x3" as I turned it over, I found inside a perfectly preserved picture of me, just prior to graduating from high school.. Cool! a find! although I did happen to still have the same picture and in fact still have the high school album that it was taken for but still, it was in good shape and a find. Here it is:




Thinking that was about it, I picked up some broken glass, a few this and thats and then picked up the last piece of paper, turned it over to find another picture of me. This picture shows me sitting in a rocking chair, a chair currently in my living room. It was probably taken when I was 12 or so. I have no memory of this picture and probably have never seen it before but now I have it. Curious.

This was a very nice day

It started early, somewhere around 6am when I awoke from a pleasing dream. The light was strong outside and the sun was a tryin' to get here. As usual, the three boys were waiting at the bottom of the stairs, talking about their dreams and their excitement in starting a new day too. Of course they get fed first and then I washed up and dressed in the hallway. Good day to wear my new shirt I decided and as I get ready for bed, that was a great choice. It's one of those loggers pullover shirts with the zipper about half way down and heavy fabric and long tails. Leave it out of the jeans cause it is long enough to sit on.

Since I had bacon and eggs yesterday, today seemed like a yogurt, juice and pineapple morning with just a bite or two of that great meatloaf that Roth's makes. Nothing like cold meat loaf to help the day get going. It is good to chow it slowly though. Oh yea, needed a glass of water too.

The paper did not hold much interest for me this morning. I decided to read it later if there was time. The comics did catch my eye though and for once For Better Or Worse pulled my heart strings with thoughts of Karen. In this strip, the father comes into the room, says nothing, gives his wife a big kiss and then says "it is you I love" and leaves. Such a nice moment and in a cheesy comic strip.

Before much else could happen, I was outside looking for stuff to change. I weeded here and there, walked around the place and noticed the dew was leaving the grass and it was going to be a great day. Somewhere around noon, a neighbor's alarm went off and did not stop. Thinking it might be something I could help with, I left to investigate. It was Jensen's - Bill took off on a Sunday drive with Christine and no one knew their number. Talked to Keith and Joanie some - Joanie said it was my day for Aspargas! My first! Keith is doing fine and the visit reminded me of how much we are like them - similar tastes, similar values, similar chioces. Just can't seem to get close to them.

After eating a fine lunch of meatloaf sandwich stuffed with lettuce, it was off on the mower for a few hours only to be driven back to the barn around 4 or so. Gave me a chance to do some barn cleaning and sweeping - no limit to the work that shop can use - and some more pruning on that bird planted apple tree by the shop. Off to Joanie and Smitty's to get the Aspagas - it was all picked and everything. Such a treat. Smitty showed me where the patch was and how to get it in shape. He just bought a fork lift - such a convenient thing. Then the sun broke through again and back on the mower till 7pm. Such great fun although the grass is a little tall. It is so hard to keep up with five acres of mowing this time of year.

Dinner was excellent - best there was since K left. Aspargas cooked just right, a huge salad with mixed greens and carrots and all the stuff that makes a salad good, a little satchel of meatloaf (almost gone now) and a big bowl of tomato soup. Very pleasing dinner and then I watched "The Lake House " - kind of sappy and definitely a chic flick but still worth the hour. The best part of the evening is sitting on the couch with the three boys snoozing around me. They have learned how to get along here without complaining and ever so often have to be bad to get a little attention. Lately the 'badness' has been in emptying pieces of paper out of small waste baskets - something I find amusing and certainly tolerable. I mean, if that is as bad as they need to be, then I can certainly put up with it.

And now to bed.

Lets celebrate - the vineyard is planted

Well, it is almost all planted. There was quite a tussle when Karen remembered that Emmy Domes wanted tight bunched red grapes and set aside two plants for her. Ryan and I and Jaden thought she should just wait but knew Karen was right. Also you see, the row we were planted needed at least six more plants to get done and removing these two ... well, it just didn't seem right.

And when we were done, we had over 72 new young plants in the ground. What made it so much fun was that Karen was so into it, Ryan and Jaden made sure they were there with their shovels and can-do attitude, I was almost over my cold/flu thing, the day was wondrously beautiful, the ground was ready, it was about the last weekend we could plant without being crazy late with planting and, and, and - everything was a few degrees past fine!

We still have to do a lot of stuff this spring, like get wire and anchors and dig holes and put in the black locust posts we cut (more on that later), prune the old grapes so we have more stock for next spring planting, water in the plants, put straw on the last row, etc.

By taking this piece of ground in hand and changing it in 06-07, we created another set of stories, another family memory, another thing to take care of as much as we want and something for someone in the future to remove and renew or enjoy and maintain.

What were the blue things on his tie?

All during the "speech to the nation" tonight, I couldn't stop looking at George's blue tie and wondering what the symbols were. Could they be some symbol that only Republicans can understand - that everything is alright really - or some symbol that only terrorists can understand, some hidden message like "bring it on" in terrorist symbols. Or could they be symbols that only millionaires understand, one of the secret symbols of the millionaire club. I may never know.

The yellow plug

Today was the day and here is why. I got the yellow oil plug for my chainsaw and can return to the profane task of cutting wood - something I find incredibly important and substantial, something that gives me strong feelings of accomplishment, something that makes me feel worthy in a very fundamental way. The chain saw is pretty crude really when you look at it, something devised in the early days of motors and really not improved substantially in design. Perhaps this description of some events in the last few days will help in explanation...

During all the days spent away from the office cutting wood and working on the barn and piling sticks and talking with neighbors, insurance agents and so forth, I had really no problem that couldn't solved within minutes. Everything that was in front of me had alternatives and it was simply a matter of making up my mind, finding out if anyone else cared and moving forward. No documentation, no meetings, no emails, no waiting for approval or discussion and certainly no 'lets wait and see' stuff going on. We just did what needed to be done and moved on. Sometimes I wondered if anyone else cared what decisions we made about our shared property but most every time that happened, we
remembered that everyone else was relying on us to not only decide, but to make it happen. So it just moved forward and things got done.

Then one day, during my away from the office time, I had to sit in on a big meeting, set to decide how one state agency would work with another state agency on a fairly simple matter. For one hour, 10 people sat around a table and discussed what had been under discussion for months and lo and behold, no decision was reached. No one had any thing assigned to them, no one seemed to feel like they were wasting time cause they were representing a lot of interests and were very responsible for the tax payers dollars and wanted to make the right decision... so nothing was done.

What a difference for me to go through the week on my own, moving forward through problem after problem, some very difficult and some simple and then wasting this hour listening to people not decide anything. It was really difficult not to have strong emotions about it all.

Not surprising that self-employment would provide an easier place for decision making than state government - wouldn't have to have too much of an education to figure that one out.