It’s another week gone and another week that I feel like I’m frantically trying to get hold of summer. It’s slipping away and I don’t approve. On Sunday I met a friend for coffee at Coffee Girl; it is impossible to take a bad photo there. On Monday I went over to Bumble to take photos of the smoky sunset. I have a couple far more dramatic ones but I love this crow so much; he had to be the photo of the day. No Parking, indeed. Tuesday, here is Mr. Binks being glamourous on top of the fence. A hairdressing friend kindly came over and gave my brother a haircut in the courtyard; after she left we ordered chipotle via doordash (I feel very modern; this is like my 2nd ever experiment with doordash) and Binks posed in the still smoky end of sunset. Wednesday, I did not take any photos of the lovely dinner we had at my daughter’s house – well I did, but a) they were film and b) I don’t think they are going to turn out – but I did go to the gym in the morning and here is the view, complete with pigeon. And also smoke. Thursday, here is Harvey over on the other side of the airport dike trail, aka the place we go like every single dang day and Friday, here is a young buck behind my recycling bins. Saturday, which was yesterday, was the regatta parade in which Five and I “marched.”

So the title of this week’s post stems from the fact that I couldn’t find a pen and I was thinking to myself that although I am the original chaos goblin, my son is in fact King of the Chaos Goblins. Then I started thinking about how barely controlled chaos is sort of an ongoing theme in my life and that led to me to a half remembered Douglas Adams quote about how learning to fly is falling and forgetting to hit the ground. I think there’s something here about walking too: walking is just a controlled fall. That is life, or mine, anyway: just a barely controlled fall. This past week was not, mind you, unusually chaotic. It was just the normal amount of chaotic: juggling work and eldercare and childcare and pet care and even a nice hour of therapy, which I think counts as me care.

And then yesterday was the Regatta Parade, which is a uniquely Astoria event. I participated with the college where I work: I got downtown at 9 and helped decorate the float (lifeboat) and then had coffee with a colleague at Blue Scorcher and then went back to the staging point. Then Five was delivered to the nearby gas station by her mom. Five has firm ideas about what one should wear to be in a parade so she was decked out in her illuminated fairy unicorn cape, to which we added a sailor hat. I doused us both in barely expired sunscreen and we duly walked alongside the lifeboat, throwing candy, distributing bubbles and, in my case, frantically taking photos, holding Five’s hand and smiling like a loon, because actually being in a parade is super fun. Then Five went to the funfair – aka the parking lot full of bounce houses which included one unexpected walk through replica of the large intestine, complete with infographics about polyps and bowel cancer. I lost it completely and laughed so hard I thought I would fall over. My original plan was to continue on and go to galleries for artwalk but I was so tired I had to come home and lie down. The parade completely kicked my ass.

So it was not a bad week for us. It has been a very bad week for so many in the PNW and I feel a bit guilty to report that we had a very little wildfire smoke, just enough to haze the hills and illuminate the sunset. So I leave you with the hopes that all of us will only ever again have that much smoke if any. And here, have some dramatic photos.