A wonderfully sunny day here in Portland today. I compare that to yesterday when it rained, often times pretty hard, all day and into the night. Hence the reason why there was no post yesterday, as there just wasn't anything of worth to talk about. You would think that a rainy day would give me time to gets lots of stuff done, fix pictures or write all kinds of stuff. But actually, I usually use that kind of a day as an excuse to not do much at all, preferring to spend a lot of the time reading books or watching videos. Both of which I did.
    But today was totally different. I still hung out here at the trailer for most of the morning, forgetting entirely that the big farmers market was going on today down along the water front near downtown Portland. Not to worry however as it is also on for tomorrow too, so I plan to make it down there in the morning.
    What I did end up doing was to head over to the 'Forestry Museum' over in SW Portland. An interesting little museum dedicated to forests all over the world, but really concentrating on the ones here in the U.S., and in particular the ones along the west coast states. So lots of information on redwoods and douglas fir and red cedars, as well as a few lesser species.  There was lots of stuff on the economic impact of using these forests not only for the wood they could provide but also on the importance of them in controlling and stabilizing the local environment. Mostly it talked about cutting the trees down though, and that was pretty interesting stuff. Of course one of the best parts for me was being able to get up close to a 50ton 2-truck Shay Steam Locomotive they had on the grounds. Probably my all time favorite style of locomotive, the Shay was often used in lumber and mining operations because they could climb steeper grades than regular rod and piston loco's, but they could also follow less well laid rails with out derailing. I've actually seen pictures where the lumber company would simply spike a pair of rails to round logs, (ties), laid on the ground without grading it or installing ballast. They would even lay them right across running, though shallow, streams and rivers and run the train right through the water.
    This particular locomotive has been restored enough to look good, though not enough to run unfortunately. It also has a pair of logging 'dis-connect' trucks behind it on which they have loaded 5 douglas fir logs that are at least 60' long and 3' in diameter. A very impressive load, but these engines, depending on size, could haul a lot of them out of the woods at a time if the terrain wasn't to steep.
    I spent a couple hours in that museum and then walked across the parking lot and visited the Portland Zoo for another couple of hours. A very nice zoo as far as those things go. I have an inherently hard time with zoo's in general, even though I do believe in many of the missions that they have set for themselves. This zoo at least has nice displays, and while it will never be enough, they seem to have made their displays big enough that none of the animals were just sitting around in wire cages.
    Spent a couple hours hanging out after that, just getting a quick bite to eat and reading some of my book, before heading over for the regular Saturday Contra Dance. Pretty much just locals, including the caller and the 3 person band. I of course, was pleasantly surprised to see quite a few people whom I knew, and even a couple of them who even knew who I was. A good dance over all, they had enough people for a solid 3 lines of dancers, so maybe just over 100 dancers. A few new people like usual, but it is a nice group out here so they did okay for the first half and then many of them took off at the break. The sexes were pretty much balanced this evening so no one seemed to sit out to much unless they wanted to. I found the women dancers to be pretty good over all, and the men, from what I could see, were at least adequate.
    Only one more full day here in this area to go, then I'm headed west again. Will be packing up on Monday and heading out to the Astoria area on Monday. Looking forward to being on the coast again. Just need to figure out how much time I will be spending there. I can't believe that October is nearly 2/3rd's of the way done already. So even when you are retired the time passes by to quickly.


brk*