Partly out of curiosity and a desire to explore Portland, and partly just to get off the farm after a draining week, we drove to Portland to see some art. Yesterday was "Last Thursday," the less established, "alternative" version of "First Thursday," the typical gallery walk. It takes place on Alberta Street, in a traditionally African- and Mexican-American neighborhood, that is now becoming gentrified. So we vacuumed the mouse nest off of the manifold of our Miata, turned down the convertible roof, and headed out the driveway on a very hot and sunny afternoon.

It is a journey to the city of almost two hours time. Driving generally relaxes me, and on a sunny day with the top down and a nice road, I have all the space I need to reflect. It's not too noisy in the convertible, but nonetheless, Amery and I don't feel compelled to discuss our lives with one another. It's pleasant just to sit. Driving, in the right situation, is like meditation, as there is something to concentrate on –the road, staying alive – but there is ample room to allow the mind to wander and to watch. Here, in the Columbia River Gorge, it is perhaps more like a directed meditation, as the shifting landscape providing a stream of content that is as alluring as it is, in the end, incomprehensible.

With the mouse-free engine we drive the one mile it takes to reach the street, and proceed another bit to get to the two lane highway. Turning from gravel to a paved road, I can bring the car to fifth gear, one short of the highest. It's a winding road up, then down from High Prarie to the town of Lyle. More often than not I am in fourth gear, finding the optimum balance of speed and rpm around the curves. About two-thirds the way and seven miles from the farm, we approach the crest overlooking the Gorge, which is always a thrill when space and panorama replace the interior confines of the mountain roads. Neither letting my mind wander too far away, nor allowing the adrenalin of the gear shaft and accelerator whisk me off, I pay attention to the road, which provides me with the mortal test of the sharpest curve. I pass, but Amery tells me she has seen several who haven't. I take it easy, and follow the road down its last curves to Lyle.

At Lyle we turn onto Washington State Route 14, another two-laner that is nestled between the steep rock cliffs on our right and the freight tracks on the left, with the river spreading grandly below. The road is one of gentle curves and hills. I am always immediately humbled by the rocks. They tower above us in all manner of shape, form, and texture. I never refuse a glance, yet am unable to fix my gaze on the unending variation. I'm driving at 60 mph, and I wonder whether it is the speed which creates the desire to fixate on this rich wealth of forms. If I were to stop, the cliffs would perhaps seem that much more static and impenetrable: going along, we are seduced by immobility, but find our way only by moving on.

As a child, during what might have been a lonely time of my life, I loved rocks. I considered rocks my friends, and even remember writing some poems about them. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that there is a being in rocks that is no less remarkable than the being we find in each other. Perhaps, as a young child, it was the enchantment of a long-lived experience that intrigued. Maybe I admired the way that the forces that shaped rocks gave them their hardened form, which was still only a moment in their openness to further experience.

We slow down to pass through the town of Bingen, and briefly accelerate towards the Hood River Bridge. It is small and narrow green bridge, with a metal grating that reveals the river below our whizzing tires. After paying our toll on the Oregon State side, we enter the onramp for Interstate 84 towards Portland. I set my cruise control for 69 mph.

Thus beings the next and longest phase of our journey. There are six lanes rather then two, and the rock cliffs don't hover so insistently. The tracks are still visible, with the occasional long-chained freight train passing through. There is space and panorama here now, and a sunny sky. We see the mountains which lead to the outcroppings of rocks, which border the river. There are windsurfers sailing on the river, in abundance generally, as the Gorge is one of the great centers of the sport. It feels good to be on this road, with this panorama.

Vaguely reminding me of Chinese landscapes garnered from paintings, the images I receive are rather seared into my brain as representing the archetypal West. They are real, however, simply green mountains and brown rock formed into various permutations of form by the slow acting out of geologic processes – or the violent collision of forces over time – whichever way you wish to view it. Over the summer I've been here, I've done this ride many times, and it seems both always new and deeply familiar. The combination of river and cliff provides an alternation between broad and flowing expanse on the one hand, and towering yet static immutable presence, on the other. The proliferation of rock forms suggest movement and dynamism of force, yet are frozen in time to our eyes. The river's force is visible, but only slightly: originating in a remote part of British Columbia, it is the largest river on this side of the Continental Divide – the current is swift below.

There is a deep sense of belonging as I pass through this landscape, but also a sense of being left with fragments and clues of a story I don't yet understand. I always try to put the story together, whatever story it is, but in the end, I am left only with what I see in front of me, and the feeling of pleasure and privilege of passing through. The comprehension will have to wait, maybe be infinitely deferred, while the pleasure is now, travelling on cruise control in our Miata on a bright sunny day in the Gorge.

Today we made what I think is the best frittata of my life. It was a collaboration, and a result of an attempt to clean out the icebox. I think that many people don’t realize that the delicious, precisely defined and described dishes that are served at fancy four-star restaurants come out of the same attempt: taking stock of the "primordial soup" (a large and varied pantry composed of numerous items in various stages and combinations between the raw and the cooked); an invention, decision, and declaration of what could be used and what must be used from this primordial soup; a meaning/value analysis (considering the diner’s point of view); and finally the creation of a dish, the giving of title, description, and price.

In this case, it was much simpler. Sally had gone to the chicken coop and gathered one warm, freshly laid egg; with nine others from the week it formed the backbone of the frittata. And there were the three portobellos we bought from the store. I saw a medium-sized onion on the counter (a Walla Walla Sweet, grown on the other side of the Cascades, and the equivalent to the Southern Vidalia); and Sally found a bag of Poblano peppers in the fridge. Amery, who started a garden this summer, has been collecting the herbs to fill a container as large as a lettuce bin. We chose sage and basil for the frittata portion, while she chose a good portion of the mint for a cucumber and gorgonzola salad. Coming into play as well were the dried herbs, thyme and marjoram, hanging upside-down by the window; I usually cannot resist placiing a warm pan under the herbs while gently stroking the herbs to let their leaves fall.

So herewith and post facto I’d like to share the recipe for Herbaceous Frittata with Portobello, Poblano, and Walla Walla Sweets, served with Cucumber, Gorgonzola, and Mint salad (Frittata con molti erbe, portobello, poblano ed i Walla Walla Sweets, serviti con il cetriolo, gorgonzola e la menta):

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Cut a medium to large sweet onion in half lengthwise, then in half-inch slices. Slice two to three portobellos also in half-inch slices lengthwise. Mince as generous an amount of garlic as you like. Slice a generous amount of sage leaves thinly and crosswise, and roughly chop as much thyme, marjoram, or any other herbs you like, keeping separate from the sage. Chop as much parsley as you like as well. Grate some Monterey Pepperjack or other cheese as desired.

With mise-en-place accomplished, warm a generous portion of olive oil over medium heat on the stove, in a medium large saute pan that can subsequently be placed in the oven. Add a generous portion of the garlic and most or all of the sage, cooking until it begins to sizzle and you smell the aroma nicely. Turn the heat to high, and as the garlic begins to brown, add the onion slices. Turn to coat and mix, reducing the heat to medium. When the onions have softened and separated, add the portobellos, poblanos, sage and other cut herbs, reserving the parsley and basil. Add a generous portion of salt to help the onions and mushrooms sweat, stirring to coat, cover loosely and turn heat to medium low. After several minutes (once they have released most of their moisture), uncover, turn to high, and burn the moisture completely off.

Push the vegetables to the side of the pan forming a doughnut hole. Melt some buttter in the bottom in the pan. Stir, taking the pan off the heat. Sprinkle the cheese on the vegetables, add the chopped parsley and salt to the eggs, and pour the egg mixture over all. Place the pan in the oven.

Meanwhile, skin the cucumber and dice into thick small pieces. Mince garlic and place in a bowl with olive oil to sit (this can be done before you start on the eggs). Crumble a generous portion of gorgonzola cheese in the bottom of the bowl and mash into the oil. Add lemon to the mash, and finish to taste by adding more olive oil, salt and pepper. Take a generous portion of mint and chop coarsely. Add mint and cucumber to bowl and mix. Finish with crumbled gorgonzola and serve on plates to be accompanied by the frittata.

The frittata should take approximately 20 minutes to cook. Eggs are a delicate protein, and most of us cook them for convenience’s sake, generally on too high heat and for too long. If you pay close attention to your eggs, whether making an omelette, frittata, or scrambled, and don’t overcook, they make for an entirely different and even elegant experience. So watch your frittata in the oven. Make sure you don’t overcook. Check frequently when they are almost done, by inserting a knife to judge inner warmth and gooeyness. The ideal is for them to be 98% set when you take them out. By the time they reach the table they should just be finishing, setting around the vegetables. The cheese, having melted slowly will be the better for it as well. Waiting until the end to chop the basil and toss on top allows the full aroma of the basil to be felt.

As I find in all great cooking, the ideal is for a cohesive whole within which one can differentiate the parts. The dish is the end result of its travel from the pantry and the field to the table. When one has selected ingredients one likes – the best ones – uses them generously, prepares them carefully, and shares them with friends or family, the effect is both memorable and pleasurable. A recipe cannot codify this, but it can transmit the set of instructions to be imitated and reiterated through time and across generations that, accompanied by pleasure, provides an important basis for our fondest memories.

The High Prarie Neighborhood Association held its monthly meeting this week over at the Taylor's place. I thought it would be interesting to go, particularly since we don't know for sure whether we will be settling here for good or will be only in the Lyle area occassionally. I accompanied Sally and James. It was held in a former church on the Taylor's place, which at one point had been turned into a chicken coop, then fixed up for a wedding, and now is a sometimes meeting place for the community. It is a beautful, austere modest space, with a decorative frieze of wheat painted on the wall.

There were about 20 community members there, in what I had been told would be an important meeting due to issues with the fire department that had arisen recently. (I knew that James drove the Amery's Peterbilt flatbed with Chris, one of the Fire Commissioners, to pick up a firetruck that had blown up while on its way to help fight a fire in far northern Washington.)

The meeting was called to order by Martha, a retired geologist whose annual July Fourth party I had the pleasure of attending, with Icey taking minutes. At first dealing with the unfinished business on the agenda, there was discussion of a five-year plan for the area. Some suggestions were for a farmer's market, a community center, or even a grocery store for the town. (Afterwards during the socializing, one gentleman suggested a liquor store would be an improvement, selling cottage cheese, milk, eggs and coffee in addition.) After a date was set for a meeting to get the public's input, the members of HPNA then discussed an initiative for the teenagers to raise money for a teen center by the recycling of bottles and cans (nearby Oregon has a deposit return). There was much discussion on whether the teenagers would even do it, given their behavioral characteristics at end of summer, particularly for those who had been working the harvest; and where the deposit money would go should the adults end up doing most of the work. Doug Taylor offered a spot on his property as a staging area as well as Patrice, who also had some lumber that could be used to construct a bin.

At the close of unfinished business, Fred (one of the fire commissioners, along with Chris and Doug) was recognized by Martha, and he brought up a concern that the HPNA should keep the Fire Department informed when requisitioning equipment for the department. Chris spoke up as well as Nayland, a fireman, regarding a radio that had been recently donated to one of the firetrucks that Nayland was driving. At this point, the secretary and Nayland's wife Icey got up from her chair, put her papers away, and walked out of the room off the stage-side door, slamming it behind her. Pretty soon she returned from the front door, and offered her two cents regarding the donated radio for the truck her husband took to the fire. Her view was recognized, with Sally now taking notes, but she was called out of order by Martha. I was, of course, left fairly stupefied, and my attention from that point forward was clearly within the walls of the building, and not as formerly upon the setting sun over the handsome Taylor ranch.

At that point Chris, who had anticipated much of the concern regarding the expectations for the fire department, said he had prepared a long statement. He had been very concerned when the fire truck blew up on its trip north, particularly since the department would have received several thousand dollars for its participation, but now they were left with a hefty repair bill. Most city dwellers would be unfamiliar with how a rural fire department runs. The land out West is hot and susceptible to fires, which can cause massive damage to a farmer's crops. Until recently, the newest fire truck the High Prarie department owned was a 1947 vintage. The current trucks are not much newer, and are given to the department by the Federal Government once they have been pretty much used up, with the stipulation that the Feds can requisition them for emergency fires when needed. This might leave one remaining truck to fight a several-hundred acre fire locally should it break out. Both trucks are in constant state of repair. The three commissioners are elected to the non-paid posts, and the department, which was formed by my wife's father Tom with Doug Taylor, is all volunteer. Chris gave an effective and even moving statement from the heart regarding the situation of the fire department: basically, it revolves around the absence of money, shortage of manpower, Federal and State regulations, and well-meaning dedication.

It seemed strange to be in this room and be witness to this emotional meeting, for something that most of us take for granted. Personal politics were part of it, as they always are in a community of individuals. The universality of this fact struck me, as if the content of what was being discussed (a radio donation, the state of the fire department, etc.) had far less importance than the rituals of human interaction (the exhibition of power and responsibility, the clashing of individual needs with rules of conduct and behavior, and, forever, the need to let one's voice be heard). More truely, what transpired that evening gave evidence that no matter what the situation we stir up, it is to allow the bottom silt of our heart to arise and conmingle within the social discourse of our communities, throughout the duration of our lives.

Today, we left the farm for an errand in White Salmon, the next town over, about a 40-minute drive. On the way back up the hill to high prarie, we slowed down so that a gaggle of turkeys – about seven or eight in all – could cross the street, in an orderly single file. "Turkey" is a hard word to get your head around for an American like me when you see them like that. I saw them "in the wild," but they definitely didn't act "wild."

Upon arriving at the road leading to the farm, we were stopped by a road worker, who informed us our road was being oiled. (It was paved finally, a historic moment for the Amery farm.) So we decided to do our other errand in The Dalles (the town's name comes from the French "les dalles," meaning the "trough" where the explorers and settlers would stop near the Columbia River to trade with the Indians). Heading in the opposite direction from White Salmon at about 60 miles per hour, we see a crow land just on the other side of the double yellow lines ahead. We were both surprised to see that it didn't flinch or fly away, even though we sped by within a few feet of its designated landing spot.

After our errand, we are coming back along the same road when my wife shrieks "A mouse!". She said she saw a mouse tail appear coming out of the crack where the hood meets the body of the car in front of the windshield. So we drive this time up the newly tarred road in first gear to protect our low Miata body, and once in the garage lift the hood to discover a nest of leaves just in the cranny of the manifold. We also saw a mouse escape near the car, but weren't able to catch it. So we set some traps with peanut butter and hope we are able to get it out before it does damage. My wife's sister Sally had a mouse set up house in her car's air conditioning system, and found 20 pounds of cat food stored there when she took it in to get fixed!

I had been planning on blogging on a book I recently began to read, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, but nature is invading and neutralizing my memetic ambitions today. James, who is twenty, says he long ago accepted that nature takes over all up here on the farm. I can now foresee an end to the Klickitat Memery: an auto-da-fe.

I’m back on the farm after a six day trip to the upper Northwest, driving to Bellingham to visit friends, and visiting Vancouver and Seattle. Both cities have changed remarkably since my last visit in the mid-Eighties, Seattle from the Microsoft behemoth, Vancouver with the massive Asian immigration.

Vancouver is a mirage, a true standing meme. It’s a meme as monument, a constant fluctuation back and forth from pure physicality and cultural hallucination. It’s a city existing on a quantum level, exhibiting both undeniable monumentality and pure mirage at the same time. Presumably, we should always be experiencing this fluctuation wherever we are; after all, scientists have long told us that at the quantum level all is fluctuation (if I may crudely paraphrase). Normally, all this uncertainty is imperceptible, just as the memes that we create (or that use us to perpetuate themselves) are for all intents and purposes invisible to us.

Makes me think of John Carpenter’s film They Live, where in a Los Angeles dominated by the usual commercial messages in billboards, television, etc., there exists a race of aliens that look like humans, but they can see the true messages underlying the universe of advertising: Reproduce and Die, Believe and Submit and the like.

The point is, in the Carpenter film and in our memetic world, that it is a struggle to see the signifying apparatus that we exist within, that creates us as we help create it. At certain points (as when you can get a hold of those special sunglasses that allow you to see the alien messages), it becomes apparent if we look for it. In the case of a memeplex like Vancouver, the solidity of the city evaporates before our eyes as it fluctuates between nature and construct; and standing in the center of Robson street in the midst of Eaton’s, Virgin, and Max Mara we are in the belly of the beast, within the exhilaration of emptiness, part of and apart from the standing meme running through us.

Friday began "Neon Nights" in The Dalles, the closest decent-sized town at 30 miles and at least a few thousand people. It's one of the oldest towns settled out here, a stop for Lewis and Clark, and with a legend of a watering hole that onced housed several thousand bottles of whiskey a week. The architecture is a combination of old West brick along with 50s to 70s store signage along the strip. Looks a little ragtag at the margins, but the city council has put a million dollars or two into fixing it up to restore some of its luster and heritage.

There is a restaurant and saloon there, Baldwin's, recently bought by by an outgoing former employee originally from Bulgaria, whose name I presently forget. He says he knows everyone in The Dalles, and he's probably right. He presides over an establishment with the best food in town at good prices, and a respectable selection of local microbrews and Pinot Noirs. The walls are filled with salon-style turned saloon-style painting by a turn-of-the-century local landscapist which are gorgeous not only for their privileged subject matter (The Gorge), but also for their impressive, classic oil technique. Those, and the piano staged on a one-person balcony over the dining tables, made it for me, the first time I met my wife's family, a remarkable eatery. Adding to the gestalt were the passing freight trains only a few yards away, and a magnificent grain elevator around which the birds would swirl, and which unfortunately burned down a year later in an act of arson.

So John, my wife's brother, invited us down to the opening event of Neon Nights, "Cruise 2001", which took place in front of his Internet-hosting business on 2nd Avenue. He told us that everyone brought their old cars to town, but that didn't prepare me for a signifying parade like I've never seen. James, the youngest brother, drove us down in his '84 Ford XLT Diesel, one of the younger of the trucks on the farm and clocking 280k well-maintained miles. After crossing the Columbia via the Dalles Bridge, we headed to the center of town, which inadvertently caused us to become part of the parade. It put us in a sort of a ethical conundrum, since we didn't know whether we deserved to be surrounded by a 60s Corvette, a 30s Dodge truck, and the crowd of spectators. But we were headed to John's parking lot, and found him and Jill in front.

It goes beyond "a guy thing;" I think, is definitely an American thing; and perhaps far exceeds that into the obscure regions of design and memery. This is different than a vintage car show for two reasons: First, the cars are all in operation along the city streets on a weekend night. Second, this isn't an official parade of the Memorial variety, sanctioned and organized. Anyone who wants to ride through town in their car is welcomed, so along with the succession of shiny and restored vintage cars you also saw us in our '84 Ford, another in their 70s clunker, someone else in their new BMW, etc., et. al., ad infinitum in a glorius revolving circle of post-history. I spotted my father's 50s-era Olds 500, the first car I remember, and wanted to stop it from moving, to fix it permanently as my privileged memory alone. There was the sheer pleasure of seeing the old boats, the gas guzzlers with personalities that is America's glorius and voluble tradition.

Beyond this is the shared attempt by all to place each passing model, from the original Model T to the Chrysler PT, within the historical stream, whether 1929 or 2000. As a nation, the United States might suffer from not being multi-lingual, but the capacity to be so still resides in the collective American car unconsious of brand recognition. Admittedly obscure and of little use to many, yet rich in resonance and possibility. There is a grammar of visual form being articulated before my eyes on 2nd Avenue in The Dalles on a Friday night. It is partly pure pleasure, like the elision of desire watching others dance at a junior high school "beehive" night, and partly stimulating in me the humbling awareness of the challenges facing anyone who proposes to design something of iconic lasting value, or who merely has the task of "managing" brands.

How are icons like "'59 T-Bird," "57 Chevy," "66 Mustang" inserted within the collective American car unconscious (heretofore known as CACU)? Is it design or ideology, or collective rest stops within the passing fashion parade? (In an interesting footnote, a book was recently published by Dr. Stanley Leiberson of Harvard, "A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change". His research points away from externally-driven causes in changes of fashion, yet he proposes it does change in a gradual and orderly way that "reflects mechanisms that we can understand." The Chomskian Cacu, perhaps?

Watching the parade of cacu in its simultaneity of historical form, my mind in its unruly way even stopped to consider that we were fast approaching the "Omega Point" that Teilhard de Chardin posited and that Terence McKenna (also Jesuit educated) refered to as "The Transcendental Object at the End of Time." According to McKenna, our encounter with this transcendental object is supposed occur in 2012. So come grab a seat for The Dalles Neon Cruise 2012 and experience the ride to the end of time in the front seat of an American finned Cadillac.

There was an interesting post in a "Dynamist" discussion group yesterday about an article on environmentalism in this week's The Economist. It is written by a Danish statistician who wanted to refute the anti-environmentalist views of a well-known economist, but who in the end found the data supporting him. The article begins describing the shared linguistic roots of "eco-nomist" and "eco-logist" and wonders why, sharing this root "home" these disciplines are often at loggerheads.

One hot topic whose basis he refutes is the Kyoto Agreement. According to research published by the UN Climate Change Panel, the effect of Kyoto would be to delay a rise of an expected 2.1 degrees centigrade of warming within 100 years by only 6 years. In other words, it saves the world a warming of 0.2 degrees centigrade over a 100 year period. Bjorn Lomborg states in the article, "Yet, the cost of Kyoto, for the United States alone, will be higher than the cost of solving the world's single most pressing health problem: providing universal access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Such measures would avoid 2m deaths every year, and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill".

Being on the farm here has opened my eyes to the interplay of environmental and economic factors. But I also think that it has relevance for branding. I take as a given that branding is a discipline that deals with the value (cost) of meaning. Like Robert Rauschenberg saying he operated in the space between art and life, branding operates in the space between meaning and value. On a memetic level, we might say that that memes operate in the space between the production of meaning and the survival (successful transmission) of meaning.

The point is that most of us are very comfortable in supporting the environmental cause. It is an emotional issue. As human beings living on the earth, we want to protect our environment. We are implicitly-branded environmentalists, which is why there are so many hot-trigger issues there. That might not be the reality, though. To succeed in making our "home" a better place, there is a cost/value analysis that must take place, but whose findings might disrupt the emotional bonding that has taken place with conventionally understood "environmentalism."

This might require a re-examination of books such as Marc Gobe's "Emotional Branding," to see if they articulate a way to ascertain the value of emotionally-based brands, and understand the challenges.

A friend writes: "Checked back on [your blog] last week.....what happened after July 17? It's like you're reading a good book and then it suddenly ends and one feels a bit at loss. Is there more to come?" Ah, I have a fan. I've been wondering that myself. Once you put down a story, often it is hard to pick it up. Even if, as with the Klickitat Memery, it is your own story you are creating, e.g., that of the gentleman farmer and blogger.

The simplest explanation is that I've been concentrating on the "Me, Me, meme." Stuff to do, a conflicting story to create, that of the job-seeker and job-doer, that leaves less time for the gentleman blogger. Alas, I've been learning a little more about the mechanics of html as I've led myself through the web design process both for my own site and for a friend's. Learning more about the planning of usability, and about all the other roles I've been further from while within my art directing role.

So I humbly submit my primitive but hopefully engaging site to my anonymous readers' purview. It's a content-slog, the me-me-memes of my life as expressed in discrete visual images.

The reason I finally post today is not to distribute my url, but because I saw my first rattlesnake yesterday. Watched my brother-in-law James from my window attacking it with a shovel, and walked out to see the dismembered result: the venom filled head sitting quietly in the dust, and the rest of it writhing away, shuddering, and after a while, still. Not so large as I imagined, but then again my wife saw it as larger as we described it to our 6-year old niece Tati. She wasn't so interested, having encountered several last year outside her bedroom door on the lawn.

Also these past few days some beautiful quail have been visiting us right outside our window. Perhaps they are making a nest on our roof. They aren't as flitty as other birds I've encountered, they stay close and seem a little curious. They probably shouldn't get too curious: I keep thinking of glove-boning them while in culinary school, where you remove all their bones without destroying the remaining meat, so they can be conveniently stuffed. I've always wanted to reproduce the quails stuffed with foie gras that the film Babette's Feast so lovingly described.

Another encounter with a bird was more humanitarian. Sally dropped Tati's bike on her head last weekend; my wife and Tati raced out of the house to bring her to the doctor. A little while later I hear a buzzing sound in the livingroom. It turns out to be a hummingbird frantically trying to find the exit in front of the plate glass doors. I grab a bowl and gently talk to the bird, asking it to allow me to help. Remarkably, it stays stationary while I place the bowl over it, slip a cover sheet of paper between it and the window, and take the package to the open door from whence it came. I felt proud of myself, a little tinge at least.

More animal stories: there have been cougar sitings, according to neighbors and the front page of the local newspaper. Apparently there were only 200 in Oregon in 1961 and are about 4000 now (we're actually in Washington, but they must be similar). The blacktail deer are plentiful (their regular prey) as described elsewhere in this Memery. However, the Department of Natural Resouces have us on the alert for a disease that is affecting the deer, "blue tongue disease." We are supposed to report any recently deceased deer that look like they had starved, and that might have died frothing at the mouth. Haven't seen any fitting the description, but the three deer we saw while 4-wheeling could have been caused by that. It was too late to tell.

The dogs are funny. We've been harvesting the wheat the last few days. (I was trained on Saturday and was on my own yesterday.) For some reason, the dogs–usually both, but sometimes only Chocolate–follow the Combine around the fields all day, returning utterly exhausted. I thought initially they were interested in chasing field mice, or anything else that scutters away from this monster machine. They don't seem interested in hunting, though. What's funny is that they don't follow the harvesting of the hay, but apparently every year they religiously follow the wheat Combine. Funny dogs.

No more animal stories to tell now. And anyway, I'm scheduled on the Combine. Hope to be more regular in my postings.