This just in...a chicken wearing lingerie!

Les Fabulous Girls du Oeste Coast played at Folklife on May 26, 2005, and someone made a video of it. Fortunately, I am hidden for most of the video behind a music stand.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1otKLdM3bU
The caller was the lovely and talented Davida Kaynor of Massachussetts, the chicken in lingerie, outfit compliments of Ms. Dina Blade, clogger extraordinaire. Why there was a chicken wearing lingerie, you ask? Well, let's just say this is an all GIRLS band. No boys allowed. Hence the chicken suit.

Ginger was kind enough to take the photos during the set.

Oh, and at the Lake City Dance on Thursday night, the band raised $850 for a women's shelter in town!

Does anybody know how to post mp3 files on their blog? I want to put some of our tunes up here.

Please Do Not Frighten the Faeries!

My neighbor Reggie had a birthday, which was a great excuse for a party. Apparently, when you have a party and lots of people come over, the faeries can become quite addled, and dogs especially like to muss up their gossamer wings with slobber (tooth fairies are especially prone to this, according to the many irate notes I received under my pillow as a child). For this reason, it was necessary to erect a sign admonishing visitors not to bother them. I'm not quite sure how successful this campaign was - you'd have to ask the faeries.

Miller informs everyone not to disturb the faeries.

Of course the sign could be just as effective right-side-up.

Reggie (the birthday girl in the red shirt) and friends cut the cake, baked by neighbor Robin.

How Athena became a House Owl

Back in 1997 I was an intrepid explorer. It was September, and I had a week left before heading back from my summer of research in Panama, so I hopped on a bus with a peripatetic botanist and all my audio recording equipment that made me resemble some kind of benign anarchist, and headed for La Fortuna, the cloud forest of Panama. Upon arrival, I found the walls of the research station seeping with black mold. I could barely breathe inside the building. The air was so wet that a constant mildew permeated everything, and gave me a continual headache. Our first night there, we learned to hypnotize bats.

Catching bats is not like catching birds. Neither like being held by larger beings that seem to want to eat them, but bats have an uncanny ability to tear you apart. To catch a bat, you must leave on a hike when the sun goes down, and raise mist nets high into the trees with a system of pulleys, reaching up into the canopy. The nets are the same as for birds, but when you bring them down, you had better be wearing your welding gloves, or you can kiss your fingers goodbye. And removing a squirming mammal from a mist net is an entirely different experience. But once you have these buggers in your hands, they become an entirely different beast, and very suggestive. At the end of the night, the last bats to make the net can be literally hung up as dawn comes an they slip back into their torpor of sleep. I do not know to this day if some hypnotic trick was used (I should look this up), but seeing those bats hanging upside down in a row under the eves was a sight to behold.

But this story is not about bats, it is about a very unfortunate mottled owl who came into contact with a most unforgiving barbed wire fence, and if you ever go to Panama, you will observe that the mottled owl looks very much like a screech owl.

We left Fortuna on horseback, the botanist, a Panamanian woman from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, some horsemen and myself, and headed for the town of New York. Now this particular New York did not in any way resemble its Northern neighbor, in fact, to call it a town would be unreasonably generous - it was really just a collection of 10 or so houses far from civilization. Not a valley, really, just a slopy meeting of steep hillsides. We packed in all our food in a large styrofoam cooler, which would play a significant role later in the story. The horses were needed to ford some torrid streams.

We spent several days there, I recording birds (somehow I thought I might compare House Wren calls of Western Panama with those of North America or some such nonsense), and my botanist friend dutifully collecting plant specimens heretofore unknown to science in black plastic bags. We stayed in a little hut by a spring, and ate up most of the food in the styrofoam cooler, which would later prove to be a good thing, not so much for us, but for the owl.

One the third morning, we packed out at an unreasonably early pre-dawn hour. It was several hours by horseback back to the Fortuna research station, and we were anxious to make the mid-morning bus (really a glorified van), so that we could make the six or seven hour journey back to Panama City and then Gamboa, where the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Housed many of its scientists.

It was still dark as we hauled up one of the last hills toward Fortuna. On the left, a barbed wire fence skirted the trail, presumably for cattle. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something alive on the fence. Alive and feathery and moving. I dismounted and walked up to it. Impossibly wrapped in one string of barbed wire was a terribly mangled wing, and attached to that wing, was a very frightened owl. It hissed at me when I approached. All my bleeding-heartstrings were being pulled at this moment. The poor thing must have been hunting away for mice in the field, without a care, when it collided with a unforeseen manmade object, namely, the fence. I took one look at the wing. The tissue had been deeply torn, and covered in blood. It was clear that without medical attention, this owl would never fly again.

What to do? As a bird lover, I couldn't leave a dying owl in a fence. I grabbed my towel out of my backpack and put it over the owl to calm her down. Then, gently, I pulled flesh from wire, little by little, until the entire wing was liberated. Grasping the entire owl-towel ensemble in both hands, I walked back to the horse and retrieved the styrofoam cooler, removing the few bits of lettuce and carrots still inside. It was big enough to comfortably house an owl, with room to turn around. I poked some holes in the top, and off we went.

Back at Fortuna, it became clear that the owl could not stay there. No one could care for it properly. I began to question the wisdom of taking on this unfortunate charge a week before leaving the country. I checked the Birds of Panama book - this was a Mottled Owl, widspread throughout Panama, so taking her to another elevation shouldn't be a huge shock. We hopped on the autobus to town, and then caught the midday bus for Panama City, the botanist with her seven bags of plants and me with a styrofoam cooler holding a live owl on my lap. It was 90 degrees out down at these lower elevations, with 90% humidity. Begin the long slog back to the big city. I had a soda cup with a straw full of water. Every now and then, I'd check the temperature in the cooler (nice and temperate in there!) and give the owl a sip of water through the straw. She was certainly thirsty. There I was, a bus full of Panamanians, and the blonde girl with the secret on her lap. I could have had a fer-de-lance in there, for all the other passengers knew, now that would have been exciting, but the owl was enough for me. I was worried about her, what if the wing became infected? What were her chances? What would she eat? Finally, we made it to Panama City, and then another 45 minutes or so through the Canal Area brought us home to Gamboa, where I cleaned the wounds as best I could with hydrogen peroxide, and dressed them with iodine. At least that is what I remember, although the cleaning was so difficult, what happened next is really a blur. I set the owl up in a wire cage with some water, covered it with a towel, left some water. I swore I heard hooting in the middle of the night.

In the morning I had a dilemma. What to do with the owl? Several of the resident scientists had raised orphaned owls over the years, but I was leaving. Fortunately, there was a small wildlife rehab zoo just down the road. I don't know how I got so lucky, this was in the middle of nowhere, after all. The veterinarian agreed to take her in, on the condition that I buy her several months' supply of canned cat food. They didn't have the funds to buy all that food. I remember my trip to the grocery store; canned cat food is not a hot sale item in Panama City, so it took a bit of hunting before I filled the cart with can after can of the premium-priced stuff. I hoped she would eat it. Must taste a little limpid after fresh mouse for every meal since chickhood. I delivered the food, and that was that, the owl was no longer my responsibility.

I headed home the next week, and wondered what became of the owl on the fence. About a month later I got an email from a Panamanian colleague informing me that the owl had been named "Atenas" which is Spanish for Athena, and once her wing had healed and she could "fly with a limp," the botanist had taken her into her apartment in Panama City. She became a teaching owl, traveling to schools so children could learn all about owls and raptors, and she hooted through the night in the old brick building, flying around the room in search of mice.

Athena never returned to the cloud forest, never hunted in the wild again, but as an environmental eductor, she became quite famous.

And that is the story of how Athena became a house owl.

The photos I took are of a trogon and a red-eyed tree frog in Panama.

The Crucible

What does it mean to hold on to yourself during a crucible, one of life's biggest tests? Perhaps the Rune of St. Patrick can help out. I don't think you have to be religious to appreciate the strength of these words:

At Tara, in this fateful hour,
I place all heaven with its power
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness;
All these I place with God's almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

I first read this in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

There and Back Again, or, The incredible true-life adventures of Frodo the Dog.

This was Frodo, he was my dog growing up. Once upon a time, he had an adventure, not unlike his namesake, Frodo the Hobbit, and lived to tell about it. Well, he didn't tell the story himself exactly, because that would be anthropomorphizing, which of course, we generally discourage on this website, but even though he went on his own adventure, we know exactly what transpired. In fact, every word of this story is absolutely true, because several different humans that were involved along the way remember what happened. Frodo the dog didn't live in the Shire, or Middle Earth. He lived in the Enchanted Lily Garden in Redmond.

For the purposes of this story, the role of Frodo will be played by Katy the Dog, who was named for Katuete, a town in Paraguay that I have fond memories of from when I was a teenager. Katy the dog is no relation to Frodo, but joined the family when he started to get on in years. She's not as obssessive about balls as Frodo, but she does love to swim. Swimming is her thing, in the summer or the winter. Katy has her own story, involving a violin thief, a silver Airstream trailer, a sister named Maya, and a pet adoption center that was supposed to be a music store. But this is Frodo's story, so you will have to hear her story later and be content with her impersonating (indoggonating?) Frodo for now. As you can see from the picture, Katy is very well qualified to play the part of Frodo.

She has four white paws too and a white chest, and only very close members of the family and canine experts will know the difference. So she should be able to pull it off just fine.

Now Frodo was an adventurous sort of dog. Or at least, he liked to jump into people's cars when they had their windows rolled down. He would curl up on their seats for hours, and when someone wanted to leave, they were surprised to find the dog in their car.

One late summer day, my mother, who's an artist, and would often work all night in her shop to meet a deadline, needed to fill the white one-ton Ford pickup with gas. Not sure why she picked that moment, but on automatic pilot, she drove the two miles down to Avondale Road to the Shell station that sits on the same lonely corner as the F.O.E., or Fellowship of Eagles hall, a place where men are men, generally have grey hair, and they go to drink. She filled up the truck with gas, which took a while because it had two tanks. And then she drove home.

Now Frodo was a constant fixture in our lives, although I was off at college at the time, but he didn't go unnoticed for long. Even so, it was a day or two later when my mother realized that Frodo wasn't around. We had a farm, not exactly fenced in, but this was loyal Frodo, not like him at all. Not wanting to alarm me, my mother waited a few more days before telling me of his absense. I was shocked. Frodo was the best dog ever, there was no way something could have happened to him. No, he had to show up. He'd been my good pal since he was a puppy and I was 13 or 14. But I was in Portland. What could I do. I came home. I knew he must be somewhere, so I headed to the animal shelter in Kent. Please please please deity that doesn't exist, let him be there, please! But no Frodo the dog, not in the animal shelter. What if he had been hit by a car? We put up signs, with his picture, the very one at the beginning of this story. I couldn't stay forever, I had to head back to school. I was crushed. As time passed, the chances that I would ever see Frodo again became slimmer and slimmer. I had to come to terms, my favorite dog, my obsessive ball-chaser who would crawl behind a couch and jump off an eight foot porch and wander in the woods for hours looking for a tennis ball, he was dead.

Nothing seemed right, school was a daze, Frodo the dog was gone. Then one day, my mother received a call from out of the blue.

The lady on the other end of the line simply said, "I think I found your dog, but I don't have him anymore."

A million questions. Well, where is he, what happened to him? If you don't have him, who does?

It was a late summer day. The woman had been checking up on some old friends at the F.O.E. on Avondale Road with some friends, but was about to head home, when out of the corner of her eye, she saw the dog. He was friendly, sitting by the door to the gas station, looking like he was waiting patiently for his person to come back. But as time passed, his person didn't come back. So he kept waiting.

He must have jumped in the open window of the truck, the day my mother drove it to the gas station in a daze, and jumped out when they arrived. Since my mother didn't notice that he had come along for the ride, she didn't notice his absense on her way home.

The woman couldn't just leave him at the gas station, such a friendly dog, and he jumped right into her car. She took him home. Everything would have been just fine, but her own dog did not care for Frodo at all. Frodo was easy-going. Her dog was not. Frodo would be happy to chase balls all day, but the new dog wouldn't let him. So the lady had to make a decision. She had to give Frodo away.

But a month later, she saw the signs. She was buying milk at Theno's Dairy, and there he was, the perky dog she had found at the gas station, and he had a home.

"I found your dog, but I don't have him anymore. I gave him to a man named Bob."

"Who's Bob?" Asked my Mom.

"A guy who hangs out at the Eagles Hall."

"Can I have his phone number?"

"Well, he doesn't have a phone."

"How can I reach him, then?"

"You can try calling the Eagles Hall."

So my mom called the Eagles Hall.

"Yeah, this is Bob."

"I think you have my dog, Frodo. A black dog, really friendly, with four white paws."

"I have your dog. But I'm not giving him back."

My mother's heart sank. Not give Frodo back? Frodo, the wonder dog? Frodo, the best dog ever? This was not possible. Of course, someone would love Frodo as much as we did. After all, he was the best dog ever. Certainly, an older guy with a lonely life would find him a great companion.

"Look, I need my dog back."

No dice.

The lady had told my mother that Bob lived somewhere on Education Hill, but she wasn't sure where. My mother was desperate. One day, she got in the truck with Sparky, our old white husky. Sparky had been left in the front seat of the car of one of my mother's friends when it was parked outside a grocery store when he was only a puppy, so he became my brother's dog. Sparky was a good and sweet dog, but never the sharpest stick in the bunch, not like Frodo. He was allergic to his own skin, and fleas, and arthritic now, and had been hit by a car when he was young, so his bones were bugging him. But Sparky was loyal. Together, my mother and Sparky rumbled their way around Union Hill to an area peppered with the occasional mobile home. Parking the truck at the end of a driveway, my mother got out and walked up to a door and knocked. A girl answered.

"Do you know a guy named Bob?" My mother asked the girl.

"Naw, we pretty much keep to ourselves around here," was the reply.

Turning around, my mother headed back up the driveway. When she got near the truck, there was Frodo, wagging his tail by the truck, happy to see her and Sparky, and ready to jump back in the open window.

And that is the story of Frodo's incredible true-life adventure. He lived happily ever after till the ripe old age of 14, and my mother always checked the windows and the passenger's seat from then on.

Copyright 1996-2006 Susanne Bard

Still Life with Sacrificial Lamb and Chocolate Bunny

Easter 2006

Easter 2006

I had forgotten that Easter is a holiday celebrated by many children the world 'round, well, the Western world at least. Here is Lily exuberantly sacrificing the lamb, while my mom helps out.


Lily and Sophia examining the Easter baskets.



Relaxing after the Easter meal.






Alex and Katy the Dog.

Life's a gambol if you're a goat!

to Frodo, Vistery and Sasha, even though none of you could read...

In 1984, I was 13 years, and had a little kid from California that I named Vistery. Her mother, Tokay, was the National Champion, but that was all to come later; I was lucky enough to pick Vistery before she was born. Her mother was a large doe, as were all of the goats from that herd (they say that like the trees, they grew on the Northern California mist), but e.coli had struck the kids on that farm that spring, and Vistery had a few setbacks...she never quite reached the size of her older cousins. It didn't matter, milk was in her genes, and when she was four years old, she made it into the ADGA Top Ten for Alpines (3,450 lbs. of milk in 10 months. Please do not ask me what we did with it all. You can only make so much yogurt and cheese at one time). It was a made-up name, Vistery, with my Greek and Latin roots, I decided it had something to do with vision and I was right. Whatever direction my life has taken, it's always returned somehow to the influence of animals, shaped my career path even, and Vistery, the other goats, and my dog Frodo were was a big part of that, my constant companions, and taught me, sometimes reluctantly, about patience, unconditional love, and eventually, loss.

When you are a teenager, full of tribulations, there is something about leaning your head up against a goat's belly. She will lean back, and there is comfort in that connection. There is nothing quite like a pile of baby Alpine goats sleeping in a heap, nothing softer than their black fur. You never want them to grow up, and their company is so...well...frolicksome, that you'll forgive them when they jump on your back and eat your hair. Seven or eight of them would rush up the teeter totter as one and crash down the other side, and repeat it all over and over again like it was some kind of drug, life is a constant high when you have nothing to do but play, sleep and eat.

When you grow up on a farm, though, tragedy and death are inevitable. I was 10 or 11 when I learned firsthand how to deliver a baby goat, when crazy Buttercup, the airplane-eared renegade, delivered her first kid, who in turn would give me Silver, the champion who was always smiling due to the interesting eyes-and-mouth birthmark on her side, the Alpha-goat who was Vistery's best friend, and would eat spaghetti (as long as it was vegetarian), orange juice and milk. Most goats are much more fastidious eaters, contrary to folklore, but at the risk of sounding anthropomorphic, Silver was a true gourmand of the caprine set. Probably she just liked to eat. But not every birth went well, and Vistery lost a buck in a breach presentation that got tangled in his own cord. In the pre-dawn darkness, I held his little body, warm and soft and wet against my own, and wept. I've never understood stillbirths...how could something be so alive inside for five months of healthy gestation, covered with beautiful shiny black and white hair, yet suddenly die so quickly? There's a brief passage between the last safety of the birth canal and the daylight world where we tow a precarious line between life and oblivion. Will we become something? A champion, a poet, and inventor, or nothing at all. Will we be extinguished forever, never to see the light of day and become what we might have been, if only?...what is potential, really? How lucky are we that we made it through that birth canal (or however we were delivered), do we ever think about that? I think about that, I think about that all the time, how incredibly lucky I am.

Those goats got me through junior high and then high school. They listened when I had something I couldn't tell anyone else, they put up with me when I was cross, they leaned up against me when I was sad. And never did they know my true complaint, but they were there. I never had a social life with that milking schedule, I wore boots one day to school that were covered in mud, I completely forgot what was on my feet, and it was so embarrassing. The kids at Redmond High did not suffer fools lightly. Perhaps that's why no one ever asked me to the prom, but more likely, I was just shy at the time.

On March 3, 2000, I held my last goat in my arms. On March 10, Vistery would have turned 16. That is old for a goat, and she was weak; it was time. The vet made a house (farm?) call. Finally, she gamboled off forever and we buried her in the garden. Frodo, dear sweet Frodo, my one-track mind ball dog joined her several years later in the garden. And Sasha the dog made her way into the garden in February. Whenever death comes around again, it never gets any easier, no matter how inevitable or expected. It seems like the biggest tragedies happen when I'm at my happiest, or completely distracted by something else. Obviously this isn't strictly true, but the greatest losses have made me love what I have even more, absolutely and unconditionally, deepened my convictions, made me cherish everything I have because it might be gone tomorrow, take absolutely nothing and noone for granted, made me wonder if I'll have time to do everything I want to do in this life, and forced me to get up and do it, and most of all to have the strength to believe in something even if its seems out of reach. Because it never really is. Not for good.

Coming soon...There and Back Again, or, The incredible true-life adventures of Frodo the Dog.

Willing to risk everything for the truth?

I specialize in lost socks, and other stuff. That's how I find people.

(I borrowed this picture off the internet. Thanks internet)

It is a proven fact that putting funny glasses on shy people makes them uncharacteristically outgoing.

What do I mean by Willing to risk everything for the truth, my byline? A friend of mine once wrote: "the world seems a lovely and funny place," and I want to see firsthand just how lovely and funny it is…but to do that, I have to face my greatest fear.

What is my greatest fear? Like Donnie Darko, is it the fear of dying alone? If I keep facing people with the truth, will I scare them all away? It’s a risk I take, willingly now, for it’s the only way I want to live. Being open to the world is a strange and wonderful and fabulous thing. And dangerous, so very dangerous. I stand along the precipice, looking down, breathing in the danger. And only then do I feel fully alive. In order to soar, I have to risk falling.

And I’ve been doing a lot of falling lately. A hell of a lot of falling.

I think Andrew Greeley, in The Great Mysteries, sums it up best, and I don't think you have to be religious to appreciate the impact of his words:

"The mystery of the Holy Spirit does not tell us that life is completely safe. It does not tell us that despite all evidence to the contrary we can trust everyone and take every risk. It does not assure us that we will not get hurt. It does not hide from us the evil of death. It does not claim to protect us from all the pain that vulnerability entails. The mystery of the Holy Spirit merely tells us that there are grounds for trust, that it is all right to take risks, and that being vulnerable to others is a better way to live. We will get hurt sometimes. We will fail often, we will be ridiculed frequently, we will be rejected occasionally, we will be shamed at least once in a while; but we will only die once. It is not safe over on the other side of the river; on the contrary it is more dangerous. But it is a much better place to be, and whichever side we choose, death will find us."

(Excepted from Andrew Greeley, The Great Mysteries, which you can read at: http://www.usao.edu/~facshaferi/greeley/mysteries3.htm)

One cold February evening, my life changed forever. It was that fateful night, or rather well into the morning, for the dawn song of the robins never lies, and the clouds hovered low over Queen Anne so that the Space Needle hung suspended above them like a flying saucer, that I threw caution to the wind, and stopped protecting myself, and stopped protecting others, from the truth, and began to ask myself what I really wanted, not what made me feel safe and secure. The only time I’m ever up at 4:30 AM is when I’ve never been to bed.

It had all started innocently enough. It was a Heaven and Hell bash, a costume pary. I was two hours late, having spent a good portion of the evening in thrift stores, and my costume was a ridiculous assortment of items found there, an old cell phone from the 80s, match box cars, silly glasses, a stuffed seahorse, a camera, a single solitary sock, you get the idea, hidden in every nook and cranny of my grandfather's woolen Russia cloak, a solitary sock stuck to the shoulder. There was so much packed in there, it weighed me down, and made me look larger than life. I had ratted out my hair, and wore big black round glasses that were far from flattering. Each floor of a three-story apartment building was devoted to Heaven (top floor), Limbo (first floor), and Hell (daylight basement level), and decorated in the regalia of each. I came as the Purgatory of Lost Things, returning items to their rightful owners, stuff they never knew they were missing, and the conceit of the costume was that in order to ascend to Heaven that night, I'd have to return ever one of those things where it belonged. I never quite made it up there, but I found some people along the way, by returning their stuff, people I was looking for.

Me (holding up a matchbox car): I think this is yours.

Arrogant Boy with beer (blank stare): What?

Me: From 1986. It fell behind your mom's couch.

Arrogant boy (in a huff): I was in junior high in 1986.

Fine, if you don't want to help me get to Heaven I'll look elsewhere.

Me (Pulling 1980s cellphone out of pocket): Hi there.

CM: Hi.

Me: I think this is yours.

CM: Huh?

Me: Don't you remember, your very first cell phone, from 1989? You were so excited. Although I'm not sure why, it's REALLY heavy.

CM (He takes the phone and examines it, turning it over in his hands): No way! You have to be kidding me!

Me: I knew you'd remember.

LK: That is not really your phone!

CM: But, it's the same phone, how did you get this phone?

Me: I found it where you left it.

CM: You're shitting me.

Me (starting to giggle).

CM: Oh my god, and I'm usually the one to pull things this kind of thing over on people.
…to be continued

Colman Neighbors Asssociation Website is finally here!

Welcome to my neighborhood! Judkins Park: The best darn place to live in Seattle. Our website has been in the works for over a year, and it's finally off the ground and running! Check us out at:

http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/commnty/CNA/index.htm