New Art

"Angels are just Poodles with Wings!"

Just listed on Ebay, a new watercolor painting of a little Poodle Angel having a chat with the man in the moon!
To visit the auction click here!
copyright 2005 Cleverpup

Hot Times in the old Town tonight!

Today was a toasty day here in the northwest, a day that would turn your frappicino mocha into a hot cup of coffee in minutes! The old record was 87 degrees set in 1947, and today we hit 90 degrees in Seattle. I really live about 16 miles north of Seattle and we were at 90 here. Yoshi, the original cleverpup, stayed most of day splayed out on the cool tile floor. Seems we skipped spring and went straight to July! :-)

UPDATE: 05/27/05 TWO 90 degree days in a row....another record bites the dust....Hmmm its a little early to be breaking heat records, doesn't look good for July and August. This may be a really HOT summer, and remember we are heat wimps in Seattle!

Another amazing cute Photo of little Sophie, my sisters eight month old girl. When I first saw this, I thought she didn't look real, she looked like one of those expensive porcelain dolls all dressed up in an antique dress. Too bad we won't be seeing Sophie, Kathy and Joe as they live in California and won't be in Ohio when we visit.....maybe next time.
copyright 2005 Cleverpup

Hmmm wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of this guy. Really. I mean it. Ian has been getting into the whole weightlifting and working out thing after his dad bought a new weight bench and barbells for him. I figure hes working out to impress his cousins in Ohio when he meets them in a month or just likes to lift heavy objects over and over. I am all for it as I could use another strong man around the house! Ian, now move that sofa over here, and put your father down!
copyright 2005 Cleverpup

Best in Show and Tell!

A lot of people feel Poodles are number one! And these two lucky pups seem to confirm that notion with their Best in Show Trophy! Don't ask me which one won, I like the little guy though.
You can find these two waiting for bids on Ebay!
copyright 2005 Cleverpup

Equine Fairy Warning

I'm feeling a little fantasy coming on....and it turned out to be a equine type fairy with wings!
Painted in lightfast ink and watercolor, this was fun to do.
copyright 2005 Cleverpup

Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!

Twenty-five years ago today, at approximately 8:32 am PDT, Mount St. Helens erupted.

* Shaken by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, the north face of this tall symmetrical mountain collapsed in a massive rock debris avalanche. Nearly 230 square miles of forest was blown over or left dead and standing. At the same time a mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. The eruption lasted 9 hours, but Mount St. Helens and the surrounding landscape were dramatically changed

25 Years Ago Today, Mt. St. Helens erupted

Geologic Time Speeds Up At St. Helens

May 18, 2005 by KOMO STAFF


SEATTLE - Volcanoes erupt and simmer, dinosaurs rule and vanish, continents slide and collide. These events occur in geologic time, over millions of years.

Then there is Mount St. Helens, young, restless and unique in the Cascade Range. The mountain that blew itself apart 25 years ago is now rebuilding its shattered dome - in a generation.

Last fall, magma began rumbling up toward the blasted crater from a chamber 4 to 6 miles down. It's been welling up at a rate of as much as 10 cubic yards per second, though the current pace is about 3 cubic yards per second.

At that rate, 1,300 feet of mountain lost in the 1980 eruption could be replaced in a few decades, said Willie Scott, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey at the Cascades Volcano Laboratory in Vancouver, Wash.

"It's kind of great to have it happening nearby," Scott said. "We're kind of along for the ride."

Before 1980, St. Helens was promoted as "America's Mount Fuji" and known for its conical symmetry - a perfection that sprang from its relative youth. It hadn't been through an Ice Age or subjected to millennia of erosion.

"The former summit of the volcano ... was a big lava dome that was sitting on the volcano like a scoop of ice cream," Scott said. It probably dated from the 16th century, when the peak was rebuilt after a period of explosive activity in the 1480s. "It was by far the youngest volcano in the Cascades."

There'd been eruptions in the St. Helens area for hundreds of thousands of years, but for centuries they only produced small lava domes, Scott said.

Volcanic eruptions don't always build a big central edifice, and St. Helens didn't start producing the lava flows that built the mountain until about 4,000 years ago, Scott said.

"It's done just about everything in those 4,000 years," Scott said. "Throughout its history, it's had this penchant for big explosive eruptions."

The mountain emerged over a rift basin, "a crack through the crust," as geologist John Pallinger at the Cascade volcano lab put it.

Far below the surface, movement in the St. Helens seismic zone - caused by shifting in the blocks that make up western Washington and Oregon - interacts with tectonic plates that form the earth's crust.

To the north and west, the Juan de Fuca plate is diving under the continental shelf - creating enough friction and pressure to melt rock, said USGS scientist Craig Weaver at the University of Washington. A big arc in the plate causes it to shove southeast under St. Helens while the fault line, trending north and west, is buffeted by action that starts with the Sierra Nevada plate to the south.

Youth and an explosive temperament make St. Helens a special structure, Scott said.

"If we'd been around 12,000 years ago, we might think Mount Baker or Mount Adams were quite special. That's when they were active," Scott said.

The dome is a brittle stone skin over hot, fluid magma. If the lava extrusions continue, the dome will eventually fill the crater and magma pushing out to the surface will spill down the outer flanks of the mountain.

"It's not unlike piling gravel up. You get a nice cone with 25-, 30-degree slopes. When the lava dome gets larger and material's cascading down all sides of it, it finally fills the crater rim and starts flowing down the flanks," Scott said. "That's one way you create those smooth symmetrical cones."

But there's no way to tell what's going to happen next at the mountain, now the focus of a busy tourist season as a result of the anniversary and recent activity.

"Basically we have the same possible outcomes as from Day One," Scott said. "It could go away over next six months - or it could go on for years, decades, centuries."

St. Helens has a near-twin on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, a 9,455-foot peak called Bezymianny. It was believed to have been extinct for 1,000 years when it exploded in the mid-1950s - torn apart, like St. Helens, by a lateral blast through its collapsing summit. Both were left with large, horseshoe-shaped craters, open on the north side.

At Bezymianny, "that lava dome started growing almost immediately. And it's been growing most of the time, so it's almost filled the crater - the top of lava dome is above the rim," Scott said.

After St. Helens, Mt. Rainier Poses Greatest Threat

Photo copyright 2005 Cleverpup

May 16, 2005

By KOMO Staff & News Services


ORTING - In the shadow of Mount Rainier, a father pushes his son on a squeaky swing set. A small dog sleeps undisturbed in the middle of a dead-end road. The tall firs lining the main street whisper in the spring breeze.

One day, the peaceful hush of this small town will be broken by a rumble that sounds like a thousand freight trains. If everything works right, sirens will wail and the town's 4,400 residents will have less than 45 minutes to evacuate - or be buried by an avalanche of mud and debris tumbling off the flank of Mount Rainier.

Scientists know that Mount Rainier, an active volcano, will one day awaken as Mount St. Helens did in 1980. It could gradually build up and explode, or part of it could simply collapse, perhaps with very little warning. It could happen in 200 years, or it could happen tonight.

"People get burned by these kind of events because they think it can't happen in their lifetime," said U.S. Geological Survey vulcanologist Willie Scott. "We can't rule out a flow of troublesome size being generated almost at any time."

A mudflow would likely be troublesome indeed for Orting. Two rivers, the Carbon and the Puyallup, drain off the mountain, hug the town and converge just beyond it, putting Orting squarely in the mountain's strike zone. The town was built atop a 500-year-old mudflow that buried the valley 30 feet deep.

Construction crews working on new housing developments for Orting's growing population have dug up massive tree stumps - the remnants of a forest buried there the last time Mount Rainier hiccuped.

The USGS ranks Mount Rainier as the third most dangerous volcano in the nation, after Kilauea on Hawaii's Big Island and St. Helens, both of which are currently active. Other studies call Rainier the most dangerous volcano in the world - not just for its explosive potential, but because of the 3 million people who live in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area. At least 100,000 people live on top of old Rainier mudflows that have solidified.

Dawn So is one of them. When she moved to Orting from SeaTac two years ago, she didn't worry about volcanos or mudflows. She was just looking for a good place to raise her children and open a quilting store.

"I wanted to have my kids in a better school district, a smaller town," she said. "I like to let them play in the front yard without having to worry about them."

She and her children have planned their escape routes, and she's confident they could get to high ground in time. But she doesn't spend much time thinking about Rainier's threat.

"It's such a highly improbable situation," she said. "Disasters can happen wherever you're at."

Disaster could strike in at least three different ways. The mountain could go through a Mount St. Helens-type buildup, with magma rising in the mountain's core and then exploding, literally blowing Rainier's top and sending mudflows crashing down on the valleys below.

Or, the magma could build up inside the mountain, never explode, but still trigger mudflows by weakening the rock and melting glaciers.

Or, part of the mountain could simply collapse without any magma buildup, weakened by centuries of hot, acidic liquid coursing through the rock. Scott said the west flank of Rainier, overlooking the Puyallup River valley, is the oldest part of Mount Rainier and thus the most likely to collapse.

In any case, rock and mud would mix with melted glaciers to create a flow with the consistency of concrete, moving as fast as 50 miles per hour. The mudflow would sweep down the valleys, picking up trees, bridges, and whatever else got in its way.

Most of the mudflows - also called lahars - from Mount Rainier were triggered by an eruption, Scott said. But the most recent, the Electron mudflow that buried Orting 500 years ago, didn't seem to follow that pattern.

"Maybe it was just a gradual weakening," Scott said. "That one sort of keeps us honest."

About 5,600 years ago the Osceola mudflow blanketed about 200 square miles northwest of the mountain. The flows reached as far north as Kent, a Seattle suburb, and drained west into Commencement Bay, now the site of the Port of Tacoma.

The risk of catastrophe every couple thousand years hasn't stopped brisk development on ancient mudflows. But as scientists identified Rainier as a threat in the decades after Mount St. Helens' eruption, government officials and citizens have begun preparing.

Last week, federal, state and local officials gathered at Fort Lewis for an exercise called "Cascade Fury III" - simulating the emergency response to an earthquake, eruption and massive mudflow from Mount Rainier. Later this month, Orting schools will practice a drill familiar to most students by now - evacuating and walking two miles to higher ground.

Chuck Morrison has been lobbying for years to make that walk faster and easier. He wants to build bridges and a path so Orting students can evacuate to a bluff about a half-mile away, rather than hightailing it across town.

This year's state budget includes $1.7 million to start engineering and planning the project. Morrison hopes to get more money from the federal government and private donors to finish the "Bridge for Kids."

Some locals have welcomed his activism, while others roll their eyes.

"Don't keep talking about that mountain! I'm sick of hearing about it," said James Nunnally, 69, whose family moved to Orting when he was 4. He'd rather see the state spend money on roads to handle Orting's growing number of commuters than on a pedestrian bridge.

"It's a farce," Nunnally said.

Morrison shrugs off criticism. A Tacoma resident, he made the pedestrian bridge his crusade after falling in love with Orting's rich railroad history and scenic beauty. He understands what draws people to a volcano's backyard.

"This place is gorgeous," Morrison said, standing on the edge of the town square, the mountain shrouded by clouds behind him. "I would love to live here."

For More Information:

vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Rainier/

Chihuahua Pillow Print

A new print,"Chihuahua Pillow Pups" is added to my stable of prints on Ebay. I have a new printer that is just fabulous and makes high quality archival prints, an Epson stylus Photo R800. I highly recommend this printer for anyone that needs to print hi res photos or art.
copyright 2005 Cleverpup

Horse study

This is a watercolor, watercolor pencil and ink study of a galloping duo. Painted on hand made paper with Deckle edging. Just listed on Ebay ready for your bids!
To view the art please click here.
copyright 2005 Cleverpup

New Art

Just listed on Ebay! New whimsical dog art perfect for that original gift. This is something new, deckle edge hand made water color paper imported from India. Perfect for scrapbooking or framing.

to view the art please click Here
copyright 2005 Cleverpup