Birthday points

Moscow is raining on us tonight, making me feel at home on my birthday. Ah, the moist air, the well-wishes of many friends online, a sweet fun poem from Roo, and a spot of investigative journalism for my informative speech in progress--a lovely day all around. Seri's gone to the store for cake mix (we're being lazy). 

                                                                Here's my speech topic:

Yes. This is a giant bronze porcupine on a pole. I live in one of the apartments you see behind it. (There are more trees now, though.) Here's a closeup:

This talented beastie is also a weathervane. She can turn with a breeze in a smooth and terrifying fashion as we hurry past underneath her. (I say "she" because Ruby named her Harriet Vane, after another prickly character from the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.)

Why? Why does a 350-pound, seven and a half foot tall porcupine spin 26 feet above the married student and family housing, next to the campus childcare center? Well, I have some partial answers.

Walsh Construction, the Portland-based company who built the housing units nearly twenty years ago, has a habit of perching weathervanes atop their big projects. Kind of a signature. Their go-to guy for the sculptures is a talented fellow named Keith Jellum, who lives in Sherwood. (Seeing this last on the plaque at Harriet's base made me warm and happy inside, even as I prepared to run for my life at the least tremble of the pole.) You may have seen some of his creations in Portland; for instance, his "Sky Cephalopod" rises above the roofs of the Oregon Zoo. Check out his website; grand work.

Mr Jellum had a curious encounter with a porcupine on a walk out on the Alvord Desert once, and was fascinated enough to research and sculpt and cast his "Porc d'Espine," as she's called (French for "thorny pig"). I say "curious" because there's absolutely nothing living out on this desert, it seems, but for the two of them at that moment. They got close enough to check each other out, pondered for a while, then went their separate ways. And we lucky Muscovites got a permanent commemoration.

Honestly though, I enjoy Harriet. She's weathered to a bearlike brown now, but she's still breathtakingly spiky. The child care staff say the children don't even notice her. I guess only we new residents do. ~tremble~

All right. Enough with the prickly piggie for now. Pretty soon I'll try a first draft on my Imitation Poem for poetry class (based on Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition, by Wislawa Szymborska).

But first, Doctor Who! Hey, it's my birthday.