6000onions

Weather

Posted on February 22, 2026 by mygothlaundry

The gallery is still no good and that’s because I can’t just install a plugin. If I had a working brain, I would have checked on that before I spent $40 I don’t have on a gallery plugin I can’t install. But alas! Like so many of my fellow Americans, my brain done left the building a while back. Now I will either have to completely migrate and redo my site, which is daunting, or get my money back, which is also daunting. God I love the 21st century SO MUCH. In similar enshittification news, I bought two pairs of shoes in January using a thing called ShopPay which is basically 21st century layaway, or so I thought, until it charged me a $75 restocking fee to return a pair of $119 shoes. I am both completely furious and completely unable to face the process of fighting for my money back. Which is ridiculous, but there you have it. I really need that $75, too. I’m at the regularly visiting the food bank stage of brokeness, here. Like so many of my fellow Americans!

Anyway, the week that was was a week of weather. The weather was mostly foul and when I say that you have to understand that this is a high bar to clear on the Oregon coast in February. It was kind of drastically either horrible or great, as illustrated here.

That is Tuesday on top and Thursday on the bottom and all in all the changes have been fast and jarring. And yet, did we get a snow day or even a snow delay? No. No we did not.

Let’s see, on Sunday, Four and I went clamming as pictured here. We caught no clams because we got caught by a sneaker wave. I am ashamed of myself for allowing that to happen; for allowing Four to get too close to the water and for generally playing at the beach like the ocean is a benign thing, even at a dead low tide. I know better. She faceplanted, got rapidly covered by water, dragged to her feet by me and rushed in screaming tears up to the car, where I stripped off her soaking clothes, drained a cup or so of water out of each boot, rubbed her dry with blankets, wrapped her in more blankets, strapped her and the blankets into the car seat and zoomed home being really glad the car heater works. This is why it’s always a good idea to have a lot of blankets in the car.

The rest of the week was peaceful (*cough* boring *cough*) Monday was President’s Day and it poured rain all day, bucketing down. Tuesday it snowed in the morning and rained in the afternoon with interludes of hail. Wednesday it rained some more and was cold and raw as hell; that’s the view from one of my office windows and my weird climbing succulent. Thursday it was cold but utterly gorgeous; I went for a walk on the Riverwalk after work and saw a bunch of sealions. Friday it rained on and off but I was tired, so Four and I watched the Olympic women’s figure skating on replay from the night before. Now she wants to learn to skate but alas, the nearest rink is two hours away, so I don’t think that’s in the cards. And Saturday, which was yesterday, it poured again all day, so Harvey and I went for a very lame short walk to where the salmon hatching pens are, around the corner. Right now it’s gorgeous again but I am filled with rage at the moment and so can do nothing. I’m filled with rage kind of a lot lately and I wish I wasn’t. I might have found a therapist. Or I might not. We’ll see.

On Saturday morning I woke up from a vivid dream and was absolutely sure that an old boyfriend of mine was dead. This is the boyfriend of whom I famously said “I’m datin’ Satan” so one would think I would not be sad, but I kind of was. I put on a playlist of 80s music even though our relationship was from the early 00s – and every song was meaningful. Time! Sorrow! Then I googled him. He’s fine, or he was two months ago: a little video of his band in some bar surfaced immediately. You shit, I said, immediately changing my mind, you lied to me again.

A boyfriend from my teens however did die – a decade ago. I only found out the other day when I was googling him at 4 am, as one does. I was sad because for some reason I had always assumed that he had a nice happy normal, even successful, life but reading between the lines of his briefish obit, I think that was not the case. Damn. I always thought he was pretty stable; stable for my cohort anyway, which is to say, um, only slightly yikes. So I guess I was primed to think about death when I dreamed about Satan.

Time gets weird as you get older and so does music. The music I played to mourn Satan isn’t music we listened to together; it’s the stuff I listened to when I was breaking up with quite another person or two, back in my loose twenties. My breakup album is Genesis, Duke – and it has been since my teens. They say you stop listening to new music when you’re in your thirties but for me at least that has not been the case – I was at least in my forties or fifties, LOL. No, I’m still always looking for new music but the newer stuff doesn’t really hold the emotional resonance that the older stuff does. And Satan? Linger will forever be his song and that’s because I walked into the Haywood Road Shingles when it was playing and I started crying in produce and had to beat a hasty retreat without, if I recall correctly, even a six pack of PBR to comfort me.

And people wonder why I gave up men.

Permanently single and happier that way, see you next week!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged aging, life, mental-health, photoaday, weather, winter | Leave a comment

February

Posted on February 15, 2026 by mygothlaundry

A marshy landscape with clouds and a river in the distance — Sunday, February 8 dog walk

a foggy morning road with a red house on the right — Sunday, February 8 dog walk

Hello from the other side of Valentines Day, or, as I like to call it, National Making Single People Feel Like Shit Day. Actually it has been years since that national agenda affected me much: I’m not even nostalgic for the coupled state anymore. It’s been too long and I hate the patriarchy too much nowadays. Also, I have a grown son and a brother who I take care of and the shine, as it were, is off the rose. No offense, reasonably decent Y chromosome holders, I know you’re out there, but: WHAT THE FUCK? What, in general, The Fuck is wrong with men? I read too much Reddit these days as my beloved Metafilter dwindles itself away into the great world wide series of tubes in the sky and if you, like me, read any of those R/relationshipadvice or R/AITAH posts you too will come away going, WTF? The AITAH stuff is supposed to be Am I the Asshole but, although I remember a couple years ago when that was sort of accurate, nowadays it’s more like, Am I the Asshole for crying gently to myself while my husband and all his friends and relations pelted me with empty beer cans, stole my children to sell and buried me up to the neck in a fire ant pit? They say I’m overreacting. It’s like History’s Greatest Martyrs and, gentle reader, you will start off being appalled and then horrified and then, eventually, get to, where TF did you FIND this monster and WHY did you stay with him past the first date? And the answer, sadly, is often that the bar is so low it is in hell, and the monsters outnumber the men.

The Epstein files are, of course, front and center of the national consciousness despite the nation in question having apparently not even the slightest intention of DOING anything about them. It’s like, OK! The entire government is composed of rapist assholes from the 10th circle of hell and, hey, get back to work! Shut up and smile while the government lies, steals and builds more concentration camps. But Imma let this go, as the kids say, because I too just can’t anymore. I am going this afternoon to hold a sign on the street again, which is basically my weekend routine and, what the hell. I supposed that it ensures I will end up in the ovens faster, since my name is by this time on all the lists. I hold by the lists being a place of honor and if everyone is on them the logistics get staggering when they go to take us away, so let’s all be on them, but. But, yes, but. Oh well!

Yesterday afternoon I went downtown with my friend for ArtWalk and checked out a bunch of galleries (like none of them give out wine anymore and, dude, change for the WORSE) and there was some great stuff out there. I feel that in the last seven years since I have lived here both the food and the art has gotten significantly better. Or maybe I’m just used to it now. Anyway, on to my own art, such as it is, the week above.

The gallery above! I hope you can open these photos. It doesn’t work at all for me on my phone or tablet and that is no good. Sigh. I swear I’m going to do some research and fix it.

On Sunday I took Harvey the dog to the trail by the airport, which is an awesome place to walk your dog and I wish I could actually go there, but since Harvey is a fucking wack job when it comes to other dogs, I can’t, really. I keep trying but I know better. We did that day and it was okay because the two dog owners we encountered had actual situational awareness and leashed their dogs when I waved my arms and shouted at them. This is not always the case. On Monday morning, back to work, taking a photo on the drive, a terrible rotten dangerous thing to do. On Tuesday after work I took Harvey down to the port for our walk – that’s the place where the reactive dog owners go, we all avoid each other like the plague we are and it’s great. On Wednesday it was beautiful and I walked home, encountering these limping deer – the Crippled Deer of Astoria Oregon is a thing I will write some day. It’s just kind of dark and sad – they’ve all been hit by cars. Like, all of them. All the deer in town. So they’re all lame. And it’s tragic and depressing and well, you’re welcome, now you too can have that in your head. But there are a LOT of deer here and somehow none of them ever internalize basic traffic safety. On Thursday I had to work late, which indignity is ameliorated somewhat by the view. On Friday it rained and rained, which is what it should be doing this time of year. And yesterday was Saturday and above is the view down Commercial Street and below is a “street” shot which I quite like, from the Astoria bistro where my friend and I sat for her to have coffee and me to have a really nice Cabernet and discuss the whole caregiving thing and how hard it is and so on. There’s a lot to say and unpack there and maybe, next week, I will! More good times! And now I’m off to hold a sign. Remember, boys and girls, the only good Nazi is a thoroughly punched Nazi.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged photoaday, life, dogs, politics, writing, mental-health, love, dayinthelife | Leave a comment

Cranky

Posted on February 8, 2026 by mygothlaundry

A dog on the edge of a very reflective body of water — Sunday, February 1, Harvey at the sawmill trail

A huge bridge seen through a geometric web of power lines — Sunday, February 1, Harvey at the sawmill trail

I’m still working out the formats here, obviously. I do not love the captions as text because they really obscure the images, although frankly this week that is not a huge loss. It’s not great in mobile either and, given that we all read websites on our phones these days (except me. I read them on my iPad, haha! Looks terrible there too.) is a problem. Anyway, click through the photos if you can.

Photo a day! It’s an artistic praxis, arguably, and there is no doubt but that I have pulled myself out of the deeps of depression before this way. That’s a good thing, because digging through the archives of this blog has made me realize that hey! I’m depressed again! What a surprise!

One thing about getting older is everything becomes familiar. This depression will pass like the others before it. It’s going to have to pass without much chemical help though (small shoutout to caffeine, here) because I am now old enough to fear dementia with a white hot terror and I don’t trust antidepressants not to take me there. I have nothing to back this up except the evidence of my own brain, which has been on them on and off for over 20 years and which absolutely does not remember things the way it used to. Now wait, you say, could that be the result of your ongoing fondness for red wine and occasional espresso martinis? Why yes, yes it could. But many more serious drunks than I have passed into old age without forgetting everything they said they would do last Tuesday. Or at least I think they did. I forget. Anyway, I can’t quit drinking now while civilization or at least the US part of it is crumbling around me. It’s asking too much. And Costco’s very tasty red blend is 7.99 for a giant bottle.

So, this past week – I am starting to feel a little like Mary Chesnut these days; I’ll just complain about my vanishing lifestyle while the country falls into civil war, shall I? My lifestyle is indubitably crumbling, y’all, I fell out of the middle class again. And this time, I harbor no illusions that it’s entirely my fault. I think the tattered remnants of the rest of the middle class will be joining me down here with the terrified poor very soon indeed. Welcome to the food bank! – anyway, this past week. On Sunday I managed to take poor Harvey for a walk; it was a full moon and a very, very high tide indeed over by the sawmill trail in Warrenton. On Monday I dropped my car off for routine maintenance (holy shit, no wonder I’m poor) and on the way saw a different angle of the Megler bridge. On Tuesday I took this photo which I remember very little about; see above, re, memory. It’s clearly over by Tapiola park. On Wednesday I was over by the Port at lunchtime and captured this postcard scene. They used to have these hilariously terrible fake eagles over there to scare off the seagulls but I see they are gone. Ars brevis and all that. Thursday, I managed an early morning walk and was rewarded with the elk and the sunrise. Friday, I went to a committee meeting that meets in a bar, my favorite committee and about my favorite local bar, Inferno. The view, my gods, the view. And on Saturday, which was yesterday, we were returned to our regularly scheduled winter weather of pouring rain and howling wind, very nice. I got to stay home all day with Mr. Binks, who is disgruntled and Harvey, also disgruntled, and start a giant organizing project with the result that my living room looks even more like a bomb went off than usual.

I feel like I should say something about politics but honestly, at this point, I don’t know what to say. The Olympics started and apparently our horrific eyeliner wearing VP was vigorously booed. This booing was immediately edited out of all the recordings anyone could find. The “President” – that orange creature out of nightmare – quite literally, for many – posted an insanely racist image and screed on social media. He left it up, defended it and then took it down, carelessly blamed an unnamed staffer and that was, you know, that. The Washington Post is crumbling and the billionaire destroying it left all the newly fired staff stationed in the rest of the world without plane tickets back to the states (they are conceivably the lucky ones.) The Battle of Minneapolis rages on, but the media is not covering it anymore: they’re bored. The Epstein files came out with thousands of pages detailing horrific crimes for which nobody but the survivors will ever be punished. And the federal courts say it’s completely fine to build more concentration camps. There’s a theme here and the theme is walk carefully in this valley full of sharks and do not necessarily believe what you see.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged depression, Health, life, mental-health, photoaday, writing | Leave a comment

Tired

Posted on February 1, 2026 by mygothlaundry

Well, I just came back from a protest that, uh, actually wasn’t. It is next week. I feel foolish but! Oh well! My bad! I should have read the initial email more carefully. I will be there next week. I am trying to step up my involvement with the protest infrastructure a bit, because I feel like I’m doing the bare minimum – standing on the side of the road holding a sign alongside many mostly older people doing the same thing – and I want to do a bit more. Therefore next Saturday I will be, yes, standing on the side of the road holding a sign but it’s going to be different! A different sign!

I went to the protest on Friday – my participation in the not particularly organized General Strike was sort of also not particularly organized. I took the afternoon off. I went to the protest, which was not well attended, and then I came home and did not buy anything. I made Marcella Hazan’s 3 ingredient tomato sauce which is of course about the best red sauce in the world although it has no right to be so, and I made tofu / eggplant no meatballs from the Horn of the Moon cookbook, my favorite cookbook from the 90s. It has more or less aged well although it does do that 90s thing of tossing eggs and tamari into every recipe because, I guess, protein and hippies.

This was a rough week for no apparent reason. I’m just tired, I guess. My cold came back unexpectedly and made me tired; work was tiring for no real reason – I think it’s just the January blahs. I’m broke, I’m tired, I’m kind of fed up. I want to change my life again but realistically that’s not on the table, so I feel trapped and cantankerous. When you grow up the way I did, moving every year or so, it can start to feel unnatural and confined to stay in one place. It’s the way I play Minecraft – build a house, fix up a village, move on; lather, rinse, repeat. This house, fond of it though I am, is built (although with unlimited funds or frankly even limited, just funds, so much more could be done) and I want to move on. I’m not going to get to move on and it’s making me cranky. So on to the photos of the day! I am not crazy about the way the captions are working but I think that if you click on a photo you can get to a slideshow without them? More experimentation is necessary.

a photo of 2 cyanotype prints taking shape under a pane of glass in the sunshine — On Sunday I actually managed to make some cyanotype prints! And they turned out okay!

A big herd of elk over near the airport. — On Sunday I actually managed to make some cyanotype prints! And they turned out okay!

On further inspection, the captions don’t work very well, do they? You have to click through and then click the little i and then you can see the whole caption. Also, WordPress is stretching the horizontal photos in the slide show and I hate that. Next week, hopefully, I will have the energy to change all that. Meanwhile, thanks for reading and see you next week!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged dailylife, photoaday, protests | Leave a comment

Plagues

Posted on January 25, 2026 by mygothlaundry

It is the end of January and I have been sick for a couple of days. It started off as a general malaise on Wednesday, morphed into a migraine by Thursday afternoon and by Friday I was in my dark bedroom wearing sunglasses and reading my way through the newest Charles de Lints* like a perfectly normal person. Because I always wear sunglasses in the house and the sunlight in the kitchen is always physically painful, right? Sigh. I don’t know why I gaslight myself into believing I’m not sick when I actually am, but I always do. I don’t believe I was sick until I get better and then I say, damn, I was really sick! But at the moment when it’s happening, I’m convinced it’s all in my head.

I think that is a specifically, horribly American / capitalist delusion, thinking that you could totally heal yourself if you would just pull on the bootstraps harder. It’s fucked up and it messes with your head. It’s like perfect attendance awards and stuff like that: congratulations! You didn’t get sick, which is purely luck, or, worse, you came to school sick and infected everyone else. In this country that’s a virtue. Hell, nowadays you’d probably get a medal if your disease succeeded in killing off a member of an inferior race. Ha ha! Does that trouble you? It should. All of this should. And in fact if it does not, get the fuck out of my blog. You are not welcome here.

I wish I could laugh about this stuff but I can’t, actually. The latest murder at the front – you know, the front from the war? Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo? – has broken my heart in pieces again. And the news and the social media takes and so on and so forth are not helping at all. I increasingly think that if we want to win this war we will have to get rid of the internet altogether. I’m sad. I loved the old internet. But the billionaire’s internet we have now will not publicize the general strikes, people, and CBS news belongs to MAGA and they say that Pretti and Good (a little heavy handed there, gods, with the nomenclature) were terrorists. It’s all over, you know. There is no coming back. The only way this ends is with more blood, more death, more fire and we aren’t going to emerge as the United States. That country is dead. It’s dead and it’s never coming back and pretending nothing unusual is happening isn’t helping. If you think there’s going to be a real election and we can vote our way out of this with the help of our pals across the aisle, I have a beautiful bridge to sell you. Sorry. I wish I was not so doomer myself. And I do think we will come through, eventually. But not as one country and not soon.

* Verdict: meh and dude, why all the gore and combat? That’s not really your scene. But T. Kingfisher has a new um novella I guess out called 9 Goblins which also has combat and gore but a lot of other very wonderful stuff; I read every single thing she writes with awe. So yeah even the fantasy authors are writing the zeitgeist: combat and gore and death and sorrow. FUCK the 21st century, it bites. And FUCK ICE but that goes without saying.

So, yeah! On to the week that was!

A photo of sunset in my neighborhood, with pine trees prominent in the foreground — Monday’s dog walk in the neighborhood. Even my poor people neighborhood is beautiful and that’s why I love Astoria

A photo of daffodils — Monday’s dog walk in the neighborhood. Even my poor people neighborhood is beautiful and that’s why I love Astoria

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged books, dailylife, migraine, photoaday | 3 Comments

Photo of the Day, January 10 – 18

Posted on January 18, 2026 by mygothlaundry

Well, that was a week. I’m still figuring out how I want to to do this, format wise, but maybe this is the way? I don’t know yet. I’m going to have to either dump some images or up my plan too, which, ouch.

So, this week. Some not good stuff happened this week in my family and I would very much like to use this blog as my therapist and spill my guts out about it but, I don’t do that anymore. I wish I had a therapist, though. Damn do I wish that. Alas! It is 2026! They are thin on the ground and my ridiculously busy schedule means that that’s partly my fault. I’m on intermittent leave at work, which means I don’t have to use my own PTO, or, I only need to use part of my PTO when I take time off to care for my brother. This is amazing and I love Oregon and my job for it being available – I don’t know for sure, but I strongly suspect that this would not be possible in North Carolina. However, the catch 22 here is that I don’t feel as if I can also take off time for myself, so I don’t. This is a me problem but, there it is.

Honestly it’s not like I’m being all that productive at work. As the country spirals deeper and deeper into fascism it’s harder and harder for me to get anything done. I know the solution to this is to do more, get more involved in the resistance (such as it is, but I too am an old lady with a sign, so, hey) but see above: I don’t have much time. I have work, which is that neat 21st century version of 9 – 5, 8 – 5 plus other things that I have to attend. Somebody wrote a song about this – not the famous one, a recent take off lamenting the way work has expanded – but good luck finding it. Then I have my brother, who is either very easy or very hard, depending, but who always needs someone to go to doctor appointments and field phone calls and deal with caregivers and social workers and on and on. He needs someone to make breakfast and dinner every day and someone to make him take a shower and change his sheets and all that kind of stuff. Three times a week he has a very expensive care worker who is supposed to do all that kind of stuff, but, tbh, they prefer either walking the dog or “cleaning” my kitchen. I mean, so do I, but nobody’s paying me. After he got out of the hospital last fall it was even more intense: there were almost daily visiting nurses and PTs and OTs and more social workers and they all came to my house. This is. . not ideal. I mean, it’s good and all in the larger sense (and again, go Oregon) but I constantly feel as if I’m being judged for my house and it’s untidiness and general air of genteel decay. I hate it. People I don’t know cleaning my kitchen in a way I would not do it makes me really angry, too. See above, me problem, but.

And then there is my delightful and wonderful granddaughter, Four. She is four, that’s not really her name, but we’ll go with it until she becomes Five next July. I love her and I know that I am lucky to be so involved with her life but (there sure are a lot of buts in this post) I have her for quite a lot of almost every weekend due to her mom’s work schedule. I take her on Friday nights from 6 to whenever her mother gets home, usually around 2 am ish and this weekend I also chauffered her from birthday party to birthday party on Saturday and I have her again starting at 2:30 this afternoon and ending, I don’t know when. Probably tomorrow morning sometime.

And there is the dog, who likes to be walked, and the cat, who likes to disembowel things, specifically me if I walk by him wrong, and the fish, who like to be fed, and the plants who would like to be watered and not have to wait until I’m drinking a glass of water in their presence and suddenly am hit with a wave of terrible vegetal guilt. Not to mention the laundry and all that sort of stuff.

So all of this is a longwinded way of explaining pathetically why I did not make it to the Indivisible meeting yesterday and why I can’t find a therapist who is available when I am.

Meanwhile! The photos! Last Saturday I went to the beach and I went again this morning, so those are the bookends of the week. I found a sea urchin shell this morning! Last Sunday I met my friend for coffee at Coffee Girl and the ships were lined up so perfectly. Monday it poured and poured and was dark and foggy and altogether just Oregon coast in January. That photo is the Fred Meyer in Warrenton where I was awaiting pickup groceries. Which I never do but my daughter swears it ends up being cheaper and she may be right. The fog just sat here for several days and on Tuesday on the way to work I took this shot of the graveyard near the college. I took some more in the afternoon; I should post them somewhere. Fogtography! I loves it! Wednesday was my daughter’s birthday but I had to go to Seaside for an evening meeting so this is all I got, the freaky PNW version of Spanish moss. Thursday all hell broke loose in my family and I will just say, addiction is a fucking disease and it will break your heart in a million million pieces. Breaking, broken, crash. Yes this is an ironic shot for that conversation, but the heart needs what the heart needs and sometimes that’s space to breathe for a minute. On Friday morning I was outside the bus station early, saying goodbye, and the jogger made the composition. Yesterday, which was Saturday, I took a wrong turn off Marine Drive like some kind of dingbat amateur so I ended up crossing the bridge and going to Columbia State Park, which is very small and extremely boring but actually a nice peaceful place for a short dog walk and a photo from the other side of the river for a change. Then this morning it was back to the beach with Harvey the dog and the crabs are molting, the waves are waving and I will loan you my beach mantra, which is the four words Wind Wave Salt Sand switching up the order, over and over and over, until your brain goes blank and that’s all there is.

A square photo of a large older reddish dog running on the beach. — Saturday, January 10

A photo of the Columbia river with three commercial vessels in a line on the horizon. In the foreground are cafe tables, a bench and on the railing, a sign that says Sealions with an arrow pointing to the left. The sky is cloudy and the ground is wet. — Saturday, January 10

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged astoriaor, phoneography, photoaday, photography, pnw | Leave a comment

It’s Only Early January

Posted on January 10, 2026 by mygothlaundry

Well! What a fun week it has been! Jesus wept. I mean we started out with the “President” of the US kidnapping the president of Venezuela and it’s just gone downhill from there. I could write at some length about what I think about ICE, and Renee Good’s murder, and the other ICE murders that aren’t being talked about so much because (as we have always known in this country; be real) people who aren’t white and middle class and preferably blonde or blonde adjacent apparently pretty much deserve to be murdered out of hand by thugs in balaclavas. I am having an increasing amount of trouble dealing with the cognitive dissonance of going to work and pretending everything is fine. I notice, on rereading this blog, that this is a common, possibly constant theme. I suppose it’s time to just take it as a given.

Anyway! On to this week’s photos!

a photograph of a watery landscape with trees perfectly reflected in still water — On Saturday, January 3, Harvey and I went to Lewis & Clark National Park – specifically, Netul Landing. This is where Lewis and Clark set up camp, or near it, or something. It’s dark history, really – here is where they cut down the trees and killed the beavers and cheated the Native Americans, here is where they raped Sacagawea and lived through a brutal wet winter. But the river is beautiful.

a photo of some trees in water; the water is not usually there — Sunday, January 4: Fort Stevens Historic Area. It’s flooding. A lot of this area is flooding. So many natural disasters are eerily beautiful and floods are just photogenic as hell.

a photo of a classroom door. There is a window in the door. Behind the window are tables and chairs set up in a square and behind that are two more windows, through which is a view of the Columbia river. — Monday, January 5, back at work. The view from Towler Hall is jaw droppingly beautiful.

A photo of a black cat sitting on the kitchen floor. — Tuesday, January 6: This is Mr. Binks, our mostly feral, thoroughly evil, utterly adored, black cat.

A photo of a wide window showcasing a view of the Columbia River — Wednesday, January 7: I am attempting to move around a bit at work. This is the college gym. I should use it more often – more often than never. On Wednesday I walked around the track 6 or 7 times like a real gym going type athletic person! In my work clothes! The view is amazing but just walking in circles is not, really.

a photo taken at evening, hence blue, of some trees by the river. A ship is visible through the tree branches. — Thursday, January 8. There’s no way I can describe everything- I mean, this is outside the Safeway. I have been trying to get photos of ships through branches and so far I don’t really like any of them.

A photo of an older woman in an eagle costume standing by the street with a rainbow flag. Next to here is another older woman with a Resist flag.

And that’s Friday, January 9: at lunch I went down to the Renee Good vigil / protest. It was my lunch hour so I snuck away, as I have been doing on and off for the last year, to stand there with some sign or another. It feels pretty pointless, tbh, but then I think, this is literally the least I can do so I had better damn well do it. I have made some signs I quite like – I had an early one that said No Musk! No Ice! Stamp Trump’s Gestapo Out Like Lice! which I thought was catchy and adorable. I made drawings of Elon Musk as a muskrat with blood dripping from his claws and lice in face scarves and MAGA hats. Most people seemed confused. For Friday’s protest I borrowed a nice sign that says Melt Ice that was made by an artist I know. It’s much cleaner and more elegant than my signs. I asked the lady in this amazing costume if I could take her photo and she and her neighbor agreed. These ladies are fearless or maybe they don’t quite get where all this is going. I wish I didn’t. I hope, actually, I don’t. Where I think this is all going is very, very dark.

While we were standing there and cars were going by beeping or shooting us the finger or doing this sort of revving maneuver to shoot out exhaust that is a MAGA specialty when confronted with protests – I think they are burning the planet to own the libs? Such a great strategy – this giant truck pulled up into the middle lane. Oh fuck, I thought, this is where it gets real in little Astoria and I prepared myself for, uh, I don’t know, the back to open and a bunch of ICE to come out to kill us all? We aren’t there yet, fortunately. The driver got out, shot everyone a sort of apologetic smile and booked up the hill to the Bowpicker, Astoria’s famous fish and chips boat. And the fish and chips are pretty good, it is true.

I kind of really love that.

I have no other news. I worked all week. I made dinner every night, more or less, except Thursday when I went to the tiki bar and had gin instead. I took Harvey for a long walk on the beach this morning that we both needed badly. Today is my brother’s 77th birthday; I got him a vanilla latte at the good coffee hut. And so it goes, day by day, ICE murder by ICE murder and a hilariously devastating story by Alexandra Petri in the Atlantic.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ice, life, photoaday, politics | Leave a comment

2026 Photo A Day

Posted on January 3, 2026 by mygothlaundry

Here we go – while I usually wait 7 years between photo a day adventures, I decided that given the accelerating pace of the world, 5 years would be enough. So I’m doing it again for 2026, this time with added bloggery. 2014 and 2021 are reachable from the masthead, above. Once a week I’ll put up all 7 pictures of the week, or whatever number that it is depending on the day of the week because life happens, and blog about them. Or about my week. Or about whatever fuckery the fascists are up to now. You get the general idea.

It’s time, after all, to bring back the old internet, since the new one so clearly does not work. This blog, and these photos, by the way, are 100% free of AI (except for occasional judicious use of the denoise tool from lightroom, which, ok, as much as I hate AI, and I do hate it, I have to admit is useful) and they will stay that way. I do not traffic with the lie machine. I do not have the energy, for one thing, and for another it is, of course, destroying what’s left of the water on the planet and I like water. It’s also just flat out completely wrong on every level. You know this in your heart of hearts.

Without further ado! Here are two photos from the first week of January!

a color photo of half a sailboat in a wide expanse of salt water. There are blue hills, blue trees and a gray blue sky in the distance.

a color photo of, hmm, what do you call this? It's not a bay, it looks like part of a marina, but it isn't. It's some buildings on docks in Astoria Oregon with a sealion in the water in the foreground.

The top photo is actually half a boat. The whole sailboat drifted up, listing far sideways, in the middle of December. According to my older brother, who has dementia and lives with me, but is still pretty damn sharp when it comes to things maritime, it must have run aground and some idiot tried to right it by using the halyards which snapped them. Also, they should be shot. It drifted over by what I call the sawmill trail in Warrenton, where I walk the dog a lot. It was there for a few weeks and then, on Thursday, it had somehow broken in half more or less vertically. The half with the mast drifted across the inlet but this half, which I think is part of the cabin, is still by the sawmill trail. It is a METAPHOR for life in these United States in 2026, yo! Sinking cabin! Climate change! Fascism – this one is a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but I’m sure it has something to do with it. Probably in the way that whoever decided to ditch their boat will do nothing; nobody will do anything and it will just sink eventually. Abandonment, carelessness, pollution!

The second photo I took from the window of Sleeper Coffee where I went to meet my friend Friday morning. The mist in the pines was beautiful yesterday but the sea lions were out playing around so I took a photo of them instead. It was nice to have coffee with a friend. I was sick over my Christmas break and I don’t have many friends, so she was the first non related person I had spent time with for two weeks. Also Sleeper is just a lovely place to hang out. The coffee is frankly usually not very good, but who really cares? The atmosphere is wonderful. I live, by the way, if you are new here, in the most beautiful place in the US and possibly the world: Astoria, Oregon. It is a small cranky – in the mood sense, not in the meth sense, that’s a few miles out – town on the Oregon coast, fueled by salmon, ancient resentment, a lot of artists and the wild loose energy from the river meeting the ocean.

Posted in Photo A Day | Tagged astoria, photoaday, photography | Leave a comment

Hello from the Ongoing Slow Motion Apocalypse

Posted on June 3, 2023 by mygothlaundry

Hello! It has been almost two years since I updated this blog – I know this because my granddaughter is now referred to as The Toddler and she will be 2 entire years old in July. She is still perfect, by the way: she is small, determined and delightful and she lives with me – as does pretty much the entire rest of my family. “Come on, Harvey!” she shouts, “Harvey! Come on! Running!” And Harvey, her devoted pal, comes running. She drops her Hs like a tiny French person, so really, she is yelling Herve! And it is adorable. She calls me Mum, or Mummum and she likes to climb up and bounce dangerously on my bed or, better yet, play – and win – games designed for older children on the iPad.

Okra and Perdita are no longer with us; I miss them. It’s been five years since I moved to Oregon and the animals who came with me are gone; now I only have one pet, one Oregon dog in this filled to overflowing with humans house. He is a pretty great dog, though.

There is no housing in most of the US now. Not just no affordable housing, no housing. My daughter, who moved across the country to me with her significant other and The Toddler in November when she got finally and absolutely priced out of Asheville, has set an alert on her phone in case a rental vacancy ever shows up. Any rental vacancy. In the whole county. It goes off about once a week, if that. Yesterday it was a 500 square foot basement studio apartment for $1300 a month. That’s kind of a lot when your monthly income is around $2000, but it is, of course, cheaper than the $3000 a month an actual 2 bedroom would cost even if it was not, as they all are, mysteriously furnished, with strange lease terms: they’re Airbnbs. Of course they are. $2000 a month is what most people actually make, by the way. Even though THAT’S ANOTHER FORBIDDEN TOPIC! SHUT UP! EVERYTHING IS FINE! IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL! REAL PEOPLE MAKE REAL MONEY, SO THAT MUST BE A LIE AND IF IT ISN’T, THEN THEY AREN’T REAL PEOPLE SO THEY DON’T NEED A HOUSE. OF COURSE THE MIDDLE CLASS STILL EXISTS! WHY DON’T THEY JUST MOVE TO KANSAS? IT’S CHEAP THERE. (No, by the way, it is not. This is actually a national issue. And, to broach another forbidden topic, there are real serious reasons why sane people, particularly those with uteruses, might not want to move to, oh, a whole damn lot of the country.)

My son and his girlfriend moved in with me for a month in October. They’re still here. They both work full time. We all work. There’s still no housing and no daycare and the price of food keeps going up and up. My house is 1200 square feet. Me, I live in the garage. It’s not a very big garage, but it has three new windows, a real plastic wood look floor and a genuine vintage pink 1960s toilet in a tiny half bath. I painted it orange and crammed it full of stuff.

The plague is still here but the level of denial has ratcheted up so high that it is the primary forbidden subject these days – in these days of oh so many forbidden topics – and people in masks are stared at the way people in masks were stared at back before we got to experience a worldwide pandemic THAT NEVER HAPPENED SHUT UP SHUT UP. Yes. We have always been at war with Eastasia. EVERYTHING IS FINE! IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL FOR PEOPLE IN THEIR MID FIFTIES OR YOUNGER TO KEEL OVER AND DIE ON AN INCREASINGLY FREQUENT BASIS! COVID IS IRRELEVANT TO THE RISING DEATH RATES! COVID IS OVER! IT’S NO WORSE THAN A COLD!

I still work at the college albeit in a different department and that’s a whole, UNBELIEVABLE, INSANE, hot mess right now. I can’t talk about it. I mean, I want to, and maybe someday I can, but right now I need the job and part of the job is keeping my mouth shut. This is such a bummer, you have no idea.

So, instead, let’s talk about cognitive dissonance, the end of the world as we know it, climate change, the fact that my house is literally falling down, how you live with yourself when you’re actively working to normalize stuff that shouldn’t be normalized and, my recent trip to Canada.

Did you know that Canada is still an actual functioning country? Every American should visit if only to walk around for a day or two and go wait, functioning infrastructure? Public transportation that works? Housing and they’re building more? Healthcare of course, but I’ve beaten that drum so long I no longer pretend it’s actually possible. Honoring indigenous people – ok, fair, their track record is pretty abysmal on that front, as is ours, but in Canada it feels like they are actually trying to make some amends. Sort of. I guess. Maybe it’s just for show – but show is better than nothing. I sure don’t see a lot of native art around here, and I’m only 200 miles from British Columbia. The differences were just stark and when it came time to come back, the contrast between entering Canada, which took five minutes and involved a friendly guy asking friendly questions and the US, which took hours and involved a variety of heavily armed white men with crew cuts screaming at me and everyone else, was appalling.

The apocalypse has been proceeding in fits and starts and we’re deep in the boiling frog phase. We don’t even notice things like the tent cities anymore; they’re normal. We’ve managed to normalize so many, many things that shouldn’t be considered normal in any way shape or form that it’s no wonder there are so many crazy people around. The streets are filled with crazy people, the mass shootings continue apace, climate change has accelerated, the mass extinctions are going on – ALL THE CRABS IN ALASKA DISAPPEARED LAST YEAR AND IT WAS ONLY REMARKED UPON FOR A DAY OR TWO. The government, in the last two years, has revoked Roe vs. Wade, thus making women’s health care illegal in much of the country, refused to do anything about the shootings and demanded that old people getting food stamps get jobs. That’s just three off the top of my head. But we just keep on working our many jobs and pretending things are okay.

THINGS ARE NOT OKAY, AMERICA. THEY REALLY ARE NOT.

I feel like I’m crazy when I try to talk about stuff like this with my colleagues and yet every conversation I overhear or walk into is all about the end of the world. I am crazy, probably. I think we all are, now. I don’t see how we can possibly not be.

So, anyway, hello from the end of the world. Sometimes I think I’m just writing for some kind of weird posterity or possibly the sapient raccoons of AD 6754, whose children are as impressed by museums full of fossilized humans as ours are by dinosaurs. But for now, we’re still here and I hope I’m wrong about all this.

But I don’t think I am.

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Plague Diary 473: The Emperor’s New Plague

Posted on November 20, 2021 by mygothlaundry

On Wednesday evening, I went back to the county fairgrounds and had my Moderna booster shot. On Thursday morning, I was fine – until around 10:30, when I fell asleep and stayed that way on and off for the next 30 hours or so, punctuated by bouts of fever, complaining, the vague reading of old cozy mysteries, general all over achiness and etc. You know the drill. I know the damn drill. The drill is by now so familiar that it’s almost comforting.

It isn’t comforting.

There I was again in line with my mask. I ran into some colleagues; I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen since before that pandemic. And then I missed two days of work, which will get chalked up to the special code we have in our payroll software for all absences Covid related, because it’s the new normal, baby, and this is just the way it is now.

I wear a mask every day, all day long (I mostly order my masks from this wonderful lady by the way) and I figure I probably always will in public now, for the rest of my life. So will you. It’s not that big a deal, really. Yes, it’s a giant enormous change in everyone’s life but you can’t talk about it, because that’s just the way it is and anyway, you don’t want anyone to think you are anti-mask. For the record, I am extremely pro mask. But wearing one all day, every day, 8 hours a day is. . . it’s not great. I do not love it. I will do it forever but you know what? It sucks. Masks get gross. They need to be replaced; they cost money; they make your glasses fog up and the back of your ears hurt. I change mine halfway through every day which means I need a minimum of 10 comfortable masks a week and I created a whole new laundry routine. We all have our mask routines, now, we know the drill. Such a small thing – small things add up, you know – but here we are and it’s just the way the world is now.

Are you tired? Don’t be tired. What’s wrong with you?

We’re moving on. We’re all about the post Covid world. Never mind that we aren’t post Covid and we aren’t ever going to be post Covid and herd immunity is a complete myth: the hive mind has spoken and Covid is as over as Mom jeans and pleated front khakis and network TV news that the whole nation watches.

Meanwhile, of course, the numbers are beginning their inexorable shift upwards again. People just keep dying. It’s inconvenient of them, because the plague is over, but they do keep on dying, or getting long covid and staying sick, or doing something else, like mourning, that’s bad for the economy and the national spirit. Everything is open and lockdown is a dirty word and we, as a country, as a collective unconscious, have just decided that this is the way things are now. People die. People have always died, but there are more corpses now. More people than before and a lot – probably most – of them are poor, so it doesn’t matter. The hospitals are still full and medical workers are burned out and miserable but the plague is over, didn’t you hear the news? You know, the news, the consensual reality news like we had when I was a kid? The plague is over. Ignore the bodies. They don’t matter.

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In other political news, things are really really bad. So bad. The worst. Living in the End Times is difficult for the old cognitive dissonance detector. Between the plague and the onrushing extinction event – you think you’ve seen bodies, plague survivors? O climate change has such bodies to show you; we are only getting warmed up – and the rise of fascism and white boys doing less time for killing people at protests than black boys do for a pocketed joint, it’s difficult to be optimistic, or, in fact, anything much at all except numbed and silent. I am trying hard to keep my head as deep in the sand as is humanly possible. It’s probably not the healthiest strategy but in the end times, what the hell else is there?

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But life rolls on – at least for now – and my darling granddaughter is four entire months old and perfect. My job is bearable although it turns out that all those miserable novels about overwrought politics in academia were nonfiction. The dogs and the cat have clean bills of health – the cat pissed on my bed AGAIN though and so every night she is locked up in the box room forever. She is lucky that I did not hire an assassin, which I tell her every day. Harvey has taken on the job of being Perdita’s interpreter and if she needs to go out at night he comes and wakes me up. Perdita moves very slow, these days. I am gradually going bankrupt as usual. I still love living here. I’m still taking pictures AND THEY ARE STILL FOR SALE HINT HINT and I used my bottle and can money (i really really really love living in a civilized state, thank you Oregon) to buy a sewing machine! It is tiny and adorable and not intimidating, which is great, and I have already made a pencil skirt which is totally fine as long as you do not look closely at the waistband. Soon I will be making my own damn masks because fuck it, masking, as this post started with, is forever.