Weekend Report

I'm kind of a rock star, you know...at the end of my weekend Ladies retreat a number of young women came to me to ask if they could have their picture taken with me. Some of them told me I should be on "Survivor". How does one become such a heroine to 20 yer old Christian women?
I think it's partly because I won my very first ever team sports award on Saturday morning. I was one of 6 members of the team declared "Most Challenged" in the Warrior Princess Boot Camp games. We placed 3rd...out of 3 teams. But I did get 2 of my 3 grenades into the baskets, and I let one of my teammates paint my face with cammo paint...black and pink...I was stunning.
Another reason might be that I took my really cool fish spear that we made in class (WARP07) to add some warrior-like authenticity to my costume on Saturday evening. But the main reason was that I shared some of my favorite outdoor things with a few of them during a short walk in the park just off highway 90 in Issaquah. We found cottonwood buds just ready for harvesting to make oil for salves. There was not a nettle, a dandelion, or even a plantain to talk about nor did we see any birds, except for the 15 or 20 Great Blue Herons that flew from the trees down by the creek. They were exciting, but were pretty high up and flying fast. The park signage had pointed out that the trail to the rookery was closed, and so we could not investigate that option. Then we hit a muddy patch of trail, and I feared losing them altogether...so I pointed out that trackers LOVE mud. One of the young ladies inquired about what I might be tracking on the trail. "Well, there are dog tracks, and I saw a coyote track just back a bit," I said.
"Can you show me a coyote track?"
"I sure can," I replied and pointed to the ground just in front of us. "And there's a coyote scat," I told her. "See the little bones?" Much to my surprise, she took photos!
Had I been alone, or with other trackers, I might have teased apart the scat for a closer look at the tiny vertebrae to see if I could identify the coyote's last meal...but with my new friends, I decided to play it safe and not scare them out of tracking...who knows, one of those photos may be my intro to Tracker fame! Anybody need a famous tracker chick to teach a class? I can bring my own spear!

Merry Christmas!

What a week! It's been nice to be out of the office, because my social life has been way too busy to allow for work, too. I'm not typically a social person, but the Christmas holiday options have kept me hopping.
On Monday, I took the 7:58 bus from Duvall to Bellevue, bumping into my friend Shannon O'Donnel at the transit station. We nearly walked into each other, as we were both intent on the next part of our respective journeys, but we did have time for a quick hug and wishes for happy holidays before parting. She was on her way to her first day on a new job, and my first stop was the Barnes and Noble a couple of blocks from the bus station.
I really didn't intend to buy myself a gift...but found a really cool new field guide to trees by the National Wildlife Federation...they had the bird, wildflower, and insect versions, too, but I only got the one. I really like the way it's laid out, and I think it will be a big help with my Kamana homework. Tree ID is still hard for me.
My next stop was in Kirkland to help Ellen Haas finish some Christmas cookies and set up 100 luminarias at the park. We watched the firemen set the bonfire ablaze, enjoyed the caroling from the Christmas Ship as it sat off the shore in Lake Washington, then went back to her house for cookies, a nasty rum punch, and general merriment.
I napped on the couch while we waited for the lunar eclipse to begin. Jonathan woke me up in time to run out on the deck and see the beginning of the penumbra. Now, Seattle in December is not the best time to view an eclipse. While it was not raining, the clouds were thick. Still, the sight was worth waking up for. We went out several times to look in awe at the natural phenomena.
On Tuesday morning, I make biscuits and sausage gravy - Ellen says she'd never had it before! She cooked up a nice omlet, and Jonathan joined us before heading off to visit his family in Idaho. I used my new field guide to identify the tree that Ellen had cut - it was a nice Noble Fir. Ellen said I was correct, and I was really impressed with the new book!
Ellen and I went back to the park to pick up the luminarias, and found that some of the candles were gone from the paper bags...then we started to find them burried under the leaves...one tea light holder was chewed, with half the candle gone...squirrels, we decided, were at work. I pooped out before our planned trip to see the trumpeter swans land at Bob Heriman Park, and chose to catch a bus back to Duvall and go to bed early...I slept 10 hours straight!
On Wednesday evening, Shondell and Darlene came (with home-made egg nog) and we shared a rotisserie chicken and watched "Lethal Weapon", my favorite Christmas movie.
Last night was for Christmas Eve services, and early to bed...this morning I opened the package mom and Susan had sent, and was delighted to find, among other things, an autographed copy of a book of cowboy poems of faith!
Life is good here. Merry Christmas to all!

Zombie Tracking, or They Pay Me for This

So Wilderness Awareness School go invited - yes, invited - to have a booth at the first annual ZomBcon event at Seattle Center over Halloween weekend. They asked for a speaker to talk about where Seattle residents would go and how they would get out of the city in the event of the Zombie Apocalypse. They were serious. Did we go? You bet we did. Although October was a crazy month if the bookkeeper's office, I got permission to go work the booth on Friday (the day after our annual audit!) and on Saturday. It was a hoot...and while I had expected the event to be dark and scary, I was happily surprised to find that zombies are a lot like us...well, us from Wilderness Awareness School, anyway.

The top photo shows Lindsay and Shondell in front of our "shelter" and our table displays. Jan (or Yawn, as I like to call him), who was in my WARP class in 06/07, and now works as our web guy, had created a cool zombie-themed postcard with info about our survival skills. That's him on the far right of the center photo (with Shondell looking on) demonstrating how to make a bow-drill fire.

The third photo shows Evan, another of my classmates and his zombie friend checking out our booth. Jan and I hadn't seen him since graduation, and were surprised to bump into him there.

We were supposed to have 20 minutes to talk after Max Brooks (author of the Zombie Survival Guide) and a couple of other guys spoke. We got cut to 2 minutes, but Mike was still so amazing that I had people stopping at the booth to learn more about us!

Next post, I'll tell you how the survival skills I learned at WAS kept me from getting my butt kicked by a marine who stopped by our booth! I hope they let me out of the office more often. It was fun.

Unicorn Tracks

Yesterday I got up early enough to go out with the Tracking Club on their monthly adventure. It's a public program at Wilderness Awareness School, in which volunteer station guides get up really early in order to go find interesting animal tracks so that we will have something fun to show to whomever shows up at the office at 9...I missed the September session, and haven't had much opportunity to track anything except the house cats in my neighborhood for way too long. I was ready for a morning of tracking - and a little afraid that I wouldn't recognize a track when I saw one.
We found lots of domestic dog tracks along the river right away, and then black-tailed deer tracks, coyote tracks and interesting bird tracks. The sandbar where we decided to hold the morning's session was covered with beaver tracks, drag marks and chewed sticks. We also found river otter tracks, heron tracks and scat, the parallel tracks of a momma and baby raccoon, an interesting trail of a coyote with several gait changes, and the tracks of a yellowleg, a migratory shore bird that isn't usually present in our area. We thought we had a pretty good assortment of track and sign to talk.
But the best tracks (and story) came from 4-year old Rosemary, who came out with her Mom to learn a bit about tracking. She had mentioned that she like unicorns, which turned out not to be a good thing to tell adults. We kept asking her if the tracks we were looking at could be those of a unicorn. She had to keep explaining to the silly adults that unicorns are not real...a lesson that we kept forgetting.
Rosemary finally got annoyed with us and went to an area where we had not found any tracks of interest. There, she made her own tracks, explaining to me that "No one will know what made these!" She giggled as she created some really unique "tracks", which looked to me like a series of upside down Us with a single small dot in the center which she made with her index finger. Then she circled the line of "tracks" just like we'd circled the tracks we found earlier, and waited until a tracker came close enough to be lured over to discuss her station.
Trackers like to play tracking games, and she led some pretty advanced trackers through her series of tracks, denying that they were unicorn, Pegasus or centaur tracks...Her delight a having fooled them was real and quite adorable. And watching her explain to the adults how she made the tracks while they pretended to be puzzled was fun for me. At 4, she's a better station guide than I am, and my tracker friends are so much more open to the possibilities of what we might find out there than I am.

I probably learned more yesterday about tracking than I have in many hours of intense "study", thanks to a 4 year old and some really cool adults who were willing to be taught by her.

Another Wild Weekend!

Just in case you thought I'd gone crazy after my last post, I wanted to share what I did Saturday...A friend and I caught the bus in Monroe and rode up the pass on Highway 2 to Gold Bar to check out Gold Dust Days...The bus ride was nice, as the highway 2 traffic is quite intense on a sunny Saturday, and we were both happy to enjoy the scenery without worrying about the other drivers...Gold Bar is a small town, and it seemed that everyone had turned out for the festivities! We missed the parade, but got there in time to see the Civil War reenactors shoot off the cannon. The setting was beautiful, even if no Civil War battle ever got close to Washington...however, there WAS a ship called the USS Tahoma that was part of the Union Navy blockade! Tahoma was the name given to Mount Rainier by some of the indiginous Pacific Northwest tribes.

Darlene and I wondered through the classic car show entries, watched kids enjoy horseback rides, shopped the craft booths, and watched a bellydancing tribute to the Lennon Sisters - to "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" !!!

We also stopped at the Washington Prospector's booth and for $5, purchased a bag of sand and a goldpanning lesson. We each brought home 6-8 flecks of gold, and think we should get a bit of gear to stick in our packs...Gold Bar got it's name for a reason.

And we still made it back to Monroe in time to hit several of the garage sales we'd seen from the bus! My personal best was about $50.00 of Pampered Chef tools for $2.00...an even better deal than the gold flakes! Burgers at Red Robin and a quick stop at an antique shop completed our day. Summer in Washington is good!

Not My Usual Thing...

Friday night, biker bar, heavy metal band...never thought I'd lead a post with that combo. A bunch of us from work gathered at Pete's in Carnation to celebrate with a friend who's decided not to do the New York to Washinton commute any longer...Although we only saw Dan a couple of times a year, it's going to seem strange to work here without him. Of course there's still e-mail and FaceBook, which is how we ususally communicate anyway, and I know that his family will appreciate the fact that he's not flying across country for work anymore. So, although I'm more of a George Strait, Gary Allen, David Ball,
Steve Wariner kind of girl, I went along for the party...Pete's is where Wilderness Awareness folks gather in Carnation. The food is good -bacon burger and fries for me, with vegetarian fare for some of the others - and I can drink a rootbeer out of a brown bottle and not look too out of place. We did not know it was Metal Night until we got there...and since we grabbed a couple of tables outside in the courtyard, the music wasn't too annoying...until we got ready to leave...5 minutes inside the bar while I paid for my meal was more than enough for this country girl. Once I can hear again, I'm gonna plug some hard core country into my CD player and apologize to my brain.

Not So Traditional Basketry

While I enjoy doing traditional crafts, sometimes it's fun to just look in the sewing box and see what materials I have and experiment with what I find. This quiver is made with the same coiling technique that I've used to make pine needle baskets. I used white cotton clothesline, fine blue crochet thread, and some fancy fuzzy blue fiber I found on sale years ago. Note the vase-like curves...I still need to practice keeping the same tension. Or perhaps stop trying to watch movies while I work.

Beach Art

I love the way the seaweed is draped over the shell...looks like Mermaids were designing beach art...I don't often have the opportunity to wander on the beach. Vashon Island was great fun for me.

Island Fun

I just returned from 3 days on Vashon Island with my friend Cyndi. She's been trying to get me over for a visit ever since she and Max moved there last year. I caught a very early bus on Tuesday, and the ferry across to the island...I was on the north side of the boat admiring the beautiful Olympic Mountains, when the ferry turned slightly to enter the dock...and there was Mt Rainier off the other side!
Cyndi met me at the ferry, and we explored a beach, a wooded trail, and the town of Vashon, where we had a lovely lunch at The Hardware Store...I love a good burger and fries, and recommend them here!

We watched deer in the yard, and then saw "Avatar" - I thought it was a beautiful movie, but we agreed it was somewhat lacking in plot and character development.

On Wednesday, we made goat-milk soap and I spent a lot of time running from window to window to watch the deer. The twin fawns were so cute! I got to visit a cool coffee roasterie, and bought some new herbs for tincturing at home. We went down to a different beach, and then back to watch "Coco Before Channel" , which is pretty good, but in French, so the subtitles were necessary for me to follow the story.

Many Thursdays Cyndi has to go to Duvall anyway, and so we planned our day around the ferry trip...beach first - the tide was out, and so I got to walk the mud flats and picked up a bunch of shells, and saw a huge crab, a many-legged starfish, and we caught a quick glimpse of an otter! Even though it was in the Sound, we think it was a River Otter, not a Sea Otter - but still a big thrill. Cyndi treated me to lunch at The Monkey Tree, a nice vegetarian place with great bread and the best chocolate chip cookies that are as big as a salad plate!

I'm truly blessed to have friends here in the Pacific Northwest! My first island stay was fun, and I'll be eager to go back for more island adventures!

Book Club Naturalists

Alexia's duck seemed to think we'd lost our minds. The big female Muskovy (Cairina moschata) kept looking in the glass pane of the door - sometimes she'd even peck at the glass with her beak as if she wanted in to see what we were doing.
Really, now, is it so surprising that 8 natruralists (and one cat) would gather on the floor in front of the fireplace to look at moss through microscopes and with hand lenses? Our November book club selection was "Gathering Moss:A Natural and Cultural History" by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
We gathered, shared a wonderful harvest potluck, then spent a couple of hours on the floor enchanted by the tiny mossy "forests" and the inhabitants thereof. Miniscule transparent worms, teeny unidentified beings...what an amazing amount of life in a handful of moss.