Happy New Year!

[offcntr]

Or Hippy New Year, as one of our neighbors quipped. The first Saturday of April is the traditional start of Saturday Market, rain or shine. This is the Market's 50th season, so we particularly wanted to make the opening day.

In this case, we got a bit of both. We left earlier than usual, around 6:45 am, and caught about an hour's gap between rain showers to set up. Sun and rain played tag the rest of the day, with enough nice weather to bring out the customers (including one of my students from 30 years ago), and no pottery-crashing wind gusts, unlike last year. All in all, a pretty good day, and we even got a mostly dry spell to pack up in. (Well, the pots were all in the van before the showers returned, and we only got a little moist taking down the canopy at the very end.)

During slack moments at Market, we play "Hair of the Day," pointing out particularly outrageous or creative hair colors. Today's win was either a woman with a Hyacinth Macaw-colored bob (bright blue and yellow) or her companion, who'd braided long strips of colored cloth into his white beard. The other thing I noticed was how many women had green hair; I think I counted eight, including a mother and grade-school-aged daughters, in shades ranging from parakeet to emerald. We were wondering if this was the next big thing in fashion when, long about the seventh example or so, I figured it out: The Oregon Women's Basketball team had made it into the final four. (Sadly defeated by Baylor in the semifinals.)

One other thing new: the parking structure where I leave the van during the day has added a nifty feature: There's about a dozen spaces on the last stretch, between the spiraling parts and the exit, and they've installed signal lights on the ceiling over them. This way you can see if there are any spaces open down near the exit before you commit yourself and find that a) there aren't any and b) you have to go back down to street level, wait for the stoplight, and come back through the entrance again. This is a minor inconvenience on free-parking weekends, but more of a hassle on weekdays when you have to give your ticket to the attendant, get waved through the barricade (first hour is free) and then start all over again. I wonder if they'd had any accidents from people trying to back up to the turn?