At the Copper Vine, on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

My stepfather started raising chickens and ducks in the yard a few years ago, and now he has a lively and growing poultry operation offsite. He added turkeys this year - we ate 2 at Thanksgiving, also a duck. (They were delicious!) My stepfather has always loved eggs as aesthetic objects, and he’s been entranced by the variety of eggs he gets from his birds. He’s taken to crossing some of them in an effort to get different egg colors (particularly smooth, olive colors). They’re all beautiful.

Snow in Seattle is fun and everything, but not if you have to go anywhere or do anything.

Seattle usually gets a snowstorm that washes away in a couple of days, maybe once or twice in a winter. Occasionally, it’s a lot of snow + a cold system that keeps it on the ground for a week. This year it was multiple storms in quick succession with occasional, desultory warming leaving zones of slush and ice, making this hilly region a disaster area for a week and a half. Even our best insulated family member is completely over it.

Mind you, there’s another tree in flower about 30 feet from this one.

Looking through the photo gallery on my phone last night, I came across this picture I took on Halloween.

It’s getting to be winter-festival time, whether that means celebrating a few more minutes of sun or a special birthday, or just the transition from one major calendar period to another. And for some reason, I’m thinking about summertime.

I’ve been more watching than doing lately. Little by little I’ll get back to some doing, though.

One turkey in the oven, another headed for the deep fryer, about to start the potatoes

I have mixed feelings about hairless cats. The result of careful breeding of cats that were hairless as result of a spontaneous mutation, the breed itself strikes me as a demonstration of man’s willingness to sustain something that should not be. Fans of the breed tout its “natural mutation” origin as if that means hairlessness is not a defect, but there’s a reason we don’t see populations of these cats in the wild: cats without hair lack temperature control and basic skin protection.

There have been attempts to give these cats a backstory as a natural breed, but they were essentially unknown except as occasional “natural mutations.” Their story feels to me like the story of companion animals in general - they are prized for their dependence on humans. The Sphynx, as the breed is called, has a reputation for being exceptionally affectionate, a “Love Mooch,” according to the profile at Cat Fanciers Association. Their skin is not completely smooth, having a very light hair. A hairless cat’s skin is generally described as similar to suede or chamois, and warm to the touch (although they can chill quickly). They look and feel so vulnerable, they are bound to trigger more than the usual parental protection feeling in people who encounter them.

The photosharing site, Flickr, can almost certainly take at least some credit for increasing the popularity of the breed. Cats are phenomenonal subjects, and hairless cats are some of the most visually interesting cats out there, sharing the physicial proportions of breeds like Siamese. They are often described by their owners as a “great conversation piece.”

I can’t fault anyone who goes to the trouble of getting a pet from a breeder for wanting to share pictures, at least, of their pet with the world, but it can be hard to find a picture of a hairless cat that doesn’t look frankly malevolent. I made an effort this week to look for a different angle. I looked for the curious, the snoozy, the engaged, the loving. They will always look odd to me, but after finding these pictures, and others like them, they do look a little more like the cats I’ve known and loved.

As a person who has grown up being presented with skeptical, intellectual owls, it’s that wide-eyed raptor’s deep lean (with careful tail counterbalance) that charms me most in this illustration. But Chui isn’t limited by sentimentality.

I actually dislike this Yeti-Bunny picture, which is why I included it. Chui’s work contains extensive caricaturing of both human and animal figures - look through the people and cat/dog images in his portfolio at Imaginism. But what drew me to him is his frequent use of a visual undercut of some kind.

For some reason, the big bad bunny eater is funny, where the yeti dragging the bunny is not. I have some idea why I react this way, but I’d be happy to hear how others react, too. Either way, his distinct style, delightful characters, and multidimensionality make him a wonderful illustrator.

Bryan’s work spans politics, popular culture, social commentary, and quiet contemplation. He says he usually starts with a beautiful landscape but can’t leave it at that. His subjects are by turns funny and mischievous and troubling and destructive. He’s thoughtful and respectful, even loving, in his work, but not sentimental. He manages to understate even in bizarre pieces.

The originals of much of the work at his portfolio site have been sold, I am delighted to see. He also makes prints available. When I started this entry, I wanted to compare him to another painter I also love, but Bryan deserves his own entry. “Apart from all the trouble we cause ourselves, I believe we are immersed in a powerful and beautiful mystery,” he says. All the most observant realists are passionate romantics, too.

“Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.”

You can also browse by people, events, culture, and more, or use search terms.

Oddly concurrently, Listverse recently published a haunting list of the last known photographs of - mostly - well-known people.

Other entries include Einstein, Monroe, Princess Di, and of course Hitler. (And Anne Frank.) Each item includes the circumstances of the photos and their discovery.

See more wonderful illustrations of animals and their kin, the simple pleasures of life, strange new characters, and food for thought - and more at the Goopymart Flickr stream.

Update: Yay! They did!

The other day I overheard someone quoting “really like your peaches, wanna shake your tree,” and it’s been going through my head ever since. Really just because it’s funny. Then I saw this article in the New York Times about William Eggleston’s work, illustrated with the photo above, which now looks even more wonderful to me than usual.

Eggleston took pictures of “nothing” and “nobodies” in color when art photography was very serious and very monochrome. He also did this in the Mississippi delta. Now that the country is engaging in an extra helping of hand-wringing over regional divisions and, here in California, a new crisis of civil-rights, his intimate, loving photography of a deep South in transition is helpful and humanizing.

More about Eggleston at the Eggleston Trust site.

I’ve been taking a lot of bike rides at lunchtime this year. I nip out to Fort Point and back - about 10 miles round trip. Sometimes I bring a camera, because there are lots of birds on that route, but sometimes all I have is my phone - which almost did the job on this partly cloudy, drizzly day, when a rainbow stretched from Alcatraz to Fort Mason as I rode back to the office.

The house is very beautiful, with simple lines and lots of glass walls. It is at the top of a steep hill that is thick with complicated rabbit warrens, all whitewashed stone and clay and glass. None of the houses have any surfaces that are more than one floor up from the earth, but because the hill is so steep and the houses so thickly built, there is a sense of a massive, towering edifice, with floors connected by narrow alleys and stairways so steep they are more like ladders.

My mother comes to visit me, and we are at the bottom of the hill when there is a flood advisory. We rush up the hill, and we talk about the house, which she hasn’t seen yet. When we get to it, my old boyfriend is inside. He has made a cup of tea and is watching the floodwaters rise in the distance below. We do not speak.

My mother and I start going through the rooms of the house, culling out things that don’t quite match with most of the contents of the various rooms. I am packing things to give to my old boyfriend.

When I look out the window again, it’s night, and I look through the glass roof into the sky. It is dense with stars, as in a developing country that cannot afford to have light pollution. You can clearly see the outline of the lower part of the African continent, with a completely thawed Antarctica balanced on its cape, curved up into the sky like an enormous breaking wave.

She made it for the New Yorker cover contest earlier this year, and I, well, I wish I had seen it then.

I have been pretty tired this week, getting back to work and finishing processing my pictures, so I’m really only halfway through the last batch. My last full day in China involved a stop in SuZhou, a beautiful little town with at least 9 formal gardens. We spent a couple of hours in the largest one, UNESCO World Heritage Site the Humble Administrator’s Garden (Zhuozheng Yuan) [Wikipedia] [my pictures at Flickr]. I am in love with these dense mixes of nature and architectural detail. More in the next few days.