Purt near perfect: a mojito, a new book, and our quiet deck. Our 2012 summer had a lot of non-summer days, but this was one of the warm ones—70^o F.

Some addictions are socially more acceptable than others. Bill will grill anywhere in any weather. Accompanying the photographic proof of this is a shot of our deck in warmer times.

We love canoes. We have three canoes, fifteen paddles, and two canoeists. Do the math. Bill shows his 100-year-old Carleton at the local Wooden Boat Festival.

Bill and I respond to calls from the Marine Mammal Stranding network, mostly dead seal pups that wash ashore. You weigh the dead specimen if possible, measure it, record its exact location, then mark it with a sharpie so that others know it has been inventoried. If the pup is alive, we pup-sit, putting up a perimeter to keep people away from it, and explaining to passers-by that Momma will abandon her baby if she detects human smell on it.

We also survey an assigned beach each month for COASST, looking for dead seabirds. It's not as weird as it sounds. If anything at all goes wrong in the ocean's food column, seabirds find out about it first, being at the top of the food chain. A number of dead seabirds tells us to look for a problem. An example is that scoter wreck last winter out on the Oregon/Washington coast.

In the forest of St. Croix VI, a charming jungle bar is tucked among the trees. Out beside the bar, a shed houses several boars. You buy a six-pack of O’Doul’s and drop a can into the boar’s mouth unopened. The hog smashes the can in those wicked jaws, slurps down the beer, and spits the flattened can into a corner. The original boar who did this died of cirrhosis of the liver and the SPCA stepped in, thus O’Doul’s.

Although I retired as an editor of the Journal of Paleontology, I still edit the church’s newsletter.
The Bell runs 12 or 16 pages each month, so it keeps me pretty busy.

There are more clam diggers up here than there are clams, so the Fish and Wildlife folk seed appropriate areas with baby clams to jump start the population. They will be ready for harvest two years later. Bill and I help out.

I really should ride my bike; I need the exercise. But this little hummer is just too much fun to drive. Incidentally, we had a really cool, wet winter, spring, and summer up here in the PNW. Did I have the top down much? Yeah! Keep the windows rolled up, and you’re comfortable even with all that cloudy sky above you.

We obtained this eight-foot peapod at the Marine Science Center auction because it comes with a sail. I have never operated a sailboat (cooking in the Adventuress galley doesn’t count here) and want to learn how. Peapods with sprit rigging are notoriously difficult to sail. This is going to be an interesting adventure.

Olympic National park is about an hour away, and it is gorgeous in all seasons. Mount Rainier is four hours in the other direction, with the rest of the Cascades also easily accessible. The best of all worlds: driving these mountain highways with the top down.