[IMAGE] The Algae Princess, photo by visitor pal Rick Kvistad

…click to listen:

…about the music

Suite, for something extraordinarily sweet.

Greetings from your hostess de la kelp, the Princess of Algae herself.
As my toes (see prior post’s video below) and I have mentioned only in passing until now, Her Highness of the Low and Other Notes, who might have been a marine biologist had she not has sunk into the happy muck of a musical life, has finally found the perfect throne. Not just near the sea, but ON it.

(Yep, that’s me above, with a Washington State Ferry emerging from my neck).

No longer able to contain my musical chaos in the small den right off the kitchen of the lovely little home I own, this spring I rented an additional home on the island to house my studio, and give all those notes in my head more space. “More space” is a bit of an understatement, since the place is on hundreds of feet of waterfront, with 30 gorgeous acres behind it. Remember, folks: I grew up in a modest sized apartment in Manhattan that didn’t even have a balcony.

The house, built almost as long ago as I was, sits directly on the tide pools. Ebb tide means exploring and communing with the sea critters. Flood tide means living on a boat, as I did in Santa Barbara just a few years ago: the water rushes in under the deck. I have found heaven, and it is right here and smells like kelp.

The expanse in front of me in all directions correlates well to expansive, multi-directional thinking. And, to daydreaming, imagining, conjuring, laughing and many other happy gerunds. In fact, it’s so dynamic and distractingly awesomely incredibly unbelievably strikingly heart-wrenchingly beautiful here (there go those happy adverbs), it’s amazing that I get any work done at all. Otters, seals, deer, raccoons, bald eagles, oyster-catchers and the occasional Orca whales… ferries, sailboats, container ships, yachts, dinghies… currents and rip tides and wind and waves and an inescapable sense of not only being on a planet, but on the apparent edge of it, all pull at my attention. I pick up my camera or video about as often as I pick up my composing score pad, wanting to somehow capture this fascinating bliss. Looking out from Sidney, British Columbia, across many Canadian Southern Gulf islands, to the U.S. San Juan Islands, there’s always something going on. Always.

One word is worth a thousand pictures:
Outrageously stunning.
What? That’s two words?
Well that explains why I just write the notes and don’t play ’em, since I obviously can’t count.

Ok, so here you go: a few pictures I took today, in sequence from my deck, worth thousands of words that fail to adequately describe anything. Frankly, the photos fail, too, because you can’t get the 200 degree sweep nor the sweet smell of the saltwater nor the wonderful sound of the birds and the waves nor the sound of the lucky person with the house key going “Oh. My. Gawd.” But these’ll tide you over, for now.

To the west:
[IMAGE] Deck view

Looking at Canada:
[IMAGE] Deck view

To the north:
[IMAGE] Deck view

To the north-northeast:
[IMAGE] Deck view

And since you can’t see Canada’s Coast Range very well in the tiny photo above, here it is from the same place on the deck, closer:
[IMAGE] Deck view

To the east:
[IMAGE] Deck view

Which look like this when the sun hits it at the end of the day:
[IMAGE] Deck view

And the end of the day looks like this. Ahhhh….
[IMAGE] Deck view

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