let's do the Downtown Oly two step. Let's tackle beauty first: Step 1: Holy smoke, there has been a lot discussion about how scary and disgusting it is to walk the street of downtown Olympia. The latest installment of this sad story ran in the Daily Zero on Sept 4th. It led with a line about drunks urinating on the sidewalks. Boy, is this a sad old story with an axe to grind. But, let's just take it straight. Do drunks urinate on sidewalks in downtown Olympia. I think that could happen. Probably mainly at night because there are so few bathrooms available in downtown Olympia after hours unless you have the bills to buy a plate of food to get bathroom access. I am downtown quite a bit and it just doesn't scare me or disgust me. I get asked for money, I give it. I am tied in to this really old and weird spiritual tradition that included some lunacy about "ask and it shall be given'" and "love your enemy," and relied on an economic model of trusting that when you need a coin or two, it will mysteriously pop out of the mouth or gut of a fish (apologies to my vegan friends, I don't fish anymore) or will appear from a tiny seed. I digress... Back to bathrooms. It seems to be a fact that if you have had the good fortune to be born into this world, it's just going to be a matter of time before you will need to find a bathroom. And not just once. and not just during daylight hours.

All the talk about the bats made me curious, so I went to see for myself. It was a nice day for a walk around the Woodard Bay DNR Natural Resources Conservation Area. I didn't see any bats though.

Woodard Bay with Madroña

slideshow on the flipside

A couple months ago I wrote a blog entry about the rainbow painted on a giant electrical pole downtown (here) that was removed. Around the same time, a new rainbow appeared near the westside co-op. The guardrail-- usually covered in graffiti-- was now a rainbow.

This week I noticed this rainbow, too, went missing. A new canvas, courtesy of the city.