Saturday Market #25: Signs & Portents

Saturday was just a couple of days shy of the Equinox, and yet signs of Fall were all around. The first sign is always the tree right above Sue Theolass' & Michael Caffrey's booth, just west of the stage. It's usually the earliest, and most spectacular, of the Park trees to change into her autumnal attire. She's just barely started...



The sprinkly misty rain that's more like very very wet air than even a drizzle hung around most of the day, sometimes turning into a shower now and again...



Then at 4:40, the band Cap'n Trips played "Ripple" and the clouds parted and the sun returned to shine on the end of the day. Umbrellas gratefully abandoned, we took a grateful break from the onset of Autumn.



And tomorrow's forecast? Patchy fog before 11am. Otherwise, sunny, with a high near 83. Back to the end of Summer!

Saturday Market #24: Forks & Foolishness

Saturday was "The Day of the Forks" as Marketeer Diane McWhorter dubbed it. Metal forks have now replaced plastic ones in the food court at Saturday Market. This will keep around 4,000 forks per week out of the landfill. We've been using metal forks at Holiday Market for a couple of years. The Sustainability Committee worked on getting that program up and running for quite a while, and it's successful. It's more of a challenge to run a similar program on the Park Blocks, but the Sustainability Committee was committed to making it work, and found a commercial kitchen to wash the forks in, and created a distribution and collection system that works. The Board of Directors of the Market found the funds to purchase enough forks of our own to make it viable, as we'd borrowed Country Fair's forks for the short Holiday season in the past.

You can help, as a market-going metal fork user, by being sure to drop your used fork in the bucket provided at any compost/recycling station to help cut down on losses. If you find yourself with a surplus of forks and you'd like to add them to the pool, you can donate them by dropping them in a fork bucket!

And for the rest of the post, just a silly visual joke (we call these photodominos in Flickrland) culled from the pix of the day:










See you Saturday!

Saturday Market #23: Strange We Can Be

Eugene Celebration's theme was "Strange We Can Believe In." Not much of a stretch at Saturday Market! We believe in (and be) strange, not strange, and everything in between every week. If a picture is worth 1000 words, here is the equivalent of 122,000 words on the subject of Eugene Celebration Saturday at Saturday Market:

Off Market Musing: Strange We Can Believe In

That's the theme of this weekend's Eugene Celebration, and in many ways an fair statement of a Eugene state of mind. So many of us do believe in strange! Last night's S.L.U.G. Queen Competition and Coronation is a shining example. Eugeneans discovering their inner S.L.U.G.s and putting them on display for the adoring crowd. We've been working hard for a couple of weeks to get it all organized, the Old Queens and I, and we put together a sweet and funny show. At the end, this lovely gentleperson, The Arch Duchess Anislugsia, was elevated to Queen Anislugsia. We are in for a delightful year, I can tell!


Just a couple of hours ago I took a walk through the fenced off downtown, as crews were preparing for tonight's Celebration festivities. It's fun to stroll through the somewhat deserted streets, and feel the anticipation of the burst of energy that the evening will bring. The statue of Ken Kesey reminded me of one rainy Celebration evening in the mid-eighties. My son Victor was about three and bursting with energy. He couldn't help but dance to whatever music was going on, having fun making mud puddle splashes while he was at it. We turned to look at the gentleman sitting near us, completely enjoying Victor's dancing and egging him on. It was Ken Kesey.

Have a fun and believably strange weekend, everybody! See you at Market.