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All of the banner background photos on this site were taken by Whitey.
Above is a close-up of the bark of incense-cedar (Calocedrus decurrens) in winter.
Here they are, my adolescent Plymouth barred rock pullets (young hens) at two months, waiting at the doorway of their coop to go outside and play for the day. Their names are Ephedra, Forsythia, Geranium, and Hesperis--all of them plant/flower names, as usual for my flocks-of-four over the years.
Summer is now, for me, officially half-over. Yay! You need to understand that I’m one of maybe only seven people in the Eugene-Springfield metro area who can just barely tolerate the heat of summer but prefer the other nine months of the year. Most people around here “tolerate” the other nine months just so they can have “their” summer. And so it goes.
To escape the heat, I can go either east or west. Up the McKenzie River valley to the east, the valley itself can get very hot, but adjacent to the cold river, the air is significantly cooler . Over the years, on many a hot day “upriver” (as we say), the temperature out by the highway was 95 Fahrenheit; the temperature in the adjacent forest—between the highway and the river—was 85; and where I was just a few feet from the 56-degree river, air temperature was a pleasant 75 degrees. Ahh!
If I go west—thanks to our wonderful LinkLane bus service (just $5 from Eugene to Florence 60 miles away)—I reach the Pacific coast, which is the “refrigerator” of Lane County. And that’s just what I did this past week. Mid-afternoon on my day at the coast (see photo) it was a delicious 70 degrees, while mid-afternoon in Eugene the same day it was a blistering 92 degrees. It was hard to get back on the bus at the end of the day, knowing that I was leaving the revivifying cool coastal air, to return to the furnace-like Willamette Valley. But a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.
The garden right now is at its peak production with plenty of tomatoes, zucchini, and green peppers. My peach tree is outdoing itself this year, so it’s peaches for breakfast (on my cereal), peaches for lunch (under a dollop of vanilla ice cream), and peaches for dinner (as peach crisp or cobbler). No complaints. Plenty of apples, too (just Gravensteins so far) for apple tarts, German Apfelkuchen, and then applesauce to freeze.
That’s my update for early August. And Life goes on!
The view from my pleasant little day nest along the North Fork Siuslaw River just east of Florence, Oregon. While the Willamette Valley baked that day like an oven, the temperature at the "refrigerator" coast was delightfully cool.
Every picnic lunch upriver in the McKenzie Valley east of Eugene--where I go almost every week for a day-- ends with a LU Petit Ecolier "biscuit" (pronounced bee-squee!) from France. Here he is (Petit Ecolier means Little Schoolboy) resting on a bed of moss along the river on a hot day in mid-July.
(This page updated 04 August 2025.)
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