The Big Green House

Wet Weekend

We took a long weekend, Science Girl and I, and got the hell out of town. I was feelin’ the screws coming down on me, in a big way, so it was time to light out for the sticks for a bit and recalibrate. We got a cat-sitter for Martin, packed Lucy in the car, and spent a few days at a cabin near Sunset Falls, just outside of the lovely town of Index.

It was quite nice, if somewhat wet off and on. It rained most of Saturday. Aside from a side trip into the town of Index*, we spent most of the day hanging out at the cabin, reading and playing Scrabble. It was very relaxing for us, but between the sound of the falls (about 25 – 30 yards away; given that it had been raining for awhile and the spring melt was just beginning, it was amazingly loud), the rain, and the occasional freight train rumbling through the night, Lucy was a little nervous.

Sunday made up for that, though; we went to Wallace Falls. The only thing Lucy likes more than snacktime is running up a trail and playing Forest Dog. We’d been there before, a couple of years ago; since SG is still recuperating from an injury to her Achilles tendon, we stopped at the picnic shelter this time. That made it about a three mile round trip, I think, all of which Lucy took as fast as we would let her. Aside from a couple of off-leash dogs who gave Lucy some grief (and the pea-brained owners of said dogs, who frankly don’t deserve them), it was a great outing for all of us.

We came back home yesterday, stopping at the Serpentarium on the way. SG had been wanting to go there since she was a kid. Reptiles aren’t really my thing (venomous ones less so, and spiders of any sort even less than that), but this was fairly painless & SG enjoyed it, so there you go.

It’s a quick trip up to Index – about an hour, I think – so I imagine we’ll be back that way sometime soon. In the meantime, I’m back here in the salt mines. I still have pictures to look at, though, which I will share with you. Mine are here, and Science Girl’s are here. (This is quite possibly my favorite photograph ever.)

*Apparently I’m unable to take a trip like this without finding some dubious commercial venture to fall in love with and compulsively fantasize about for the next week or so. This weekend was no different; the historic Bush Hotel (which doesn’t really look like that anymore – these days it’s set up more on the lines of a mid-century motel more than anything else) is on the market. It was a B&B in it’s last incarnation – 10 rooms (two with private bath) upstairs, a restaurant and bar downstairs, plus what looked to be at least one and possibly two small houses in back. The price for the property wasn’t at all bad, but when you factor in getting a liquor license, remodeling the place (I saw at least one broken window, which means water damage), and the fact that, while Index is a nice place, it ain’t exactly booming, PLUS neither SG nor I having any experience in what is euphemistically referred to as “hospitality”… I mean, it was never gonna go any farther than a pleasant diversion for mental vacations while back in the world, really, but that all kinda works to keep it that way.

Escape from Blue Angel DEATH!

As it turns out, where we stayed wasn’t precisely in Lilliwaup; we were much closer to Eldon, actually, but the post office is in Lilliwaup so that’s the address for the place. Besides, Lilliwaup is much more fun to say, don’t you think? LILLIWAUP!

Right. OK. The trip over was pretty simple, although once again I was working on not much sleep. I was pretty wiped out by the time we got there, but really I think we spent maybe two hours on the road, which includes waiting at the Edmonds ferry dock and the incredibly quick ferry ride to Kingston. We barely had time to finish our lunch and get back down to the car before we docked.

It's OK now

As promised, Science Girl’s pictures from our trip to the San Juans last weekend.

Blue Moon

Back from a lovely extended weekend in the San Juan Islands. All in all a relaxing, if far too short, outing. We froze our asses off on top of Mt. Constitution (it snowed up there Friday night; we went up Sunday afternoon and I swear the wind chill was down in the single digits. The individual needles on the pines wee encased in what looked to be about maybe an eighth of an inch of ice), we lazed about on the beach at Obstruction Pass, we enjoyed relatively roaring fires in our cabin each night. Lucy got to run around on the beach and sniff the goodies at the tide line. No crab parts this time, but lots of seaweed. She also made friends with Molly, the big black and white (no clue what breed) resident dog where we were staying. This is news merely because Lucy generally takes a dim view of most other dogs, and females especially so. I did some thinking about some things, and absolutely no thinking about others, in just about the right proportions. Science Girl took pictures. Lots of pictures. 200+ pictures. She’s still sorting through them all; when she puts them on Flickr, I’ll let you know.

Oh, also, over the course of the weekend we saw at least three different bald eagles. The last one took off from the side of the road, maybe fifteen to twenty feet away, as we were driving out from Obstruction Pass. I don't know what sort of an omen that is, but I prefer to think that it's a good one.

Also also, Radio Lethargico tonight, 12:30 Pacific.

Home again home again jiggedy jig

Vacation is over. I am sad. Not devastatingly so, since my everyday life is generally pretty cool, but leaving La Push is always difficult for me to do.

Well I went to school in Olympia

We’re back. Obviously. It was a nice, if entirely too short, three-day weekend. Highlights included:

• Watching the tide roll in and out of Oakland Bay. No, really. It’s a fairly narrow, shallow bay, so the change is pretty dramatic. The cabin we rented was down near the end of the bay, (opposite that green lump projecting out into the bay – it’s actually a golf course) which became an enormous (and thankfully not too fragrant) mudflat when the tide was out. One of the houses across the bay had a sailboat anchored in front of it; the tide receded enough to leave it completely beached, about 15 feet from the low tide mark. When the tide returned, it partially flooded a small wetland area adjacent to the golf course. Maybe this makes me a dork (maybe?), but I truly dig witnessing things like that – the awesome power of nature in the everyday miracle and blah blah blah.
• Waking up early enough to watch the mist creeping in over the cedars across the bay from us. Watercolors really were invented to portray the Northwest.
• Watching Lucy swimming. Well, not so much swimming as wading, but still. She really enjoys doing it, and it is fun watching her (as long as she doesn’t try to drink the sea water).
• Science Girl’s oyster rescue service. Yeah, she eats ‘em, but she’ll also return them to the water if she finds them stranded by low tide.
• Having Science Girl show me around the Evergreen campus. SG spent the early part of her college career there, until she finally decided that it wasn’t really the right place for her. It’s just as she described it to me: while the campus itself is quite beautiful, all lush native greenery and such, the architecture is the hideous concrete-box crap that was so popular in the early 70s. You know the stuff. It always looks like a “futuristic” prison set from some cheesy Sci-Fi flick. So it was an interesting juxtaposition of the natural and the manufactured, with Mama Nature coming out miles ahead. As usual.
• Having my picture taken with Sleater-Kinney. Yes. I’ll post it as soon as the film comes back from the developers.

Less fun:

• The fish and chips lunch that just didn’t sit well Saturday afternoon. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I will mention the white-knuckle drive back to the cabin just in the knick of time. Yeesh.
• Being stuck in traffic from Olympia all the way to the other side of Tacoma. Rough estimate for that 35 mile trip on I-5 yesterday – 1 ½ - 2 hours. In 90 degree weather. Science Girl said her eyeballs felt hot, which really disturbed me in a way I don’t think I can accurately describe.

Mostly, though, it was a quiet weekend away from town (and the horrors of Seafair), so in that sense it was a huge success. And, in a mere thirteen days, we’ll be heading off for La Push again. Yay!

Don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the edge

I am supremely burnt out, kids. This relentlessly sunny weather has taken a huge chunk out of my iron will, reducing me to a hair-trigger raging asshole who can’t read a newspaper without throwing it across the room and scaring the cat. I am absolutely no fun to live with these days. (Just ask Science Girl.) Fortunately, I have a little time off coming up. Next Friday we’ll be down at the Showbox seeing The Hives, Sahara Hotnights, and The Reigning Sound. The Friday after that, we’ll be fleeing town for the weekend so’s the fucking Blue Angels don’t make me snap entirely and loose my middle-aged Fists of Fury on the teeth and gums of damn near anything that crosses my path. And, at the end of the month, I’ll be taking a full-fledged week off with SG and Lucy on the foam-flecked shore of the Olympic Peninsula, far from telephones, TVs, newspapers, and other irritations of everyday life. (Note to the more filthy-minded among you: we will be passing through both Sappho and Beaver on our trip. Smirk if you must.)

Let’s hope it rains before then, or I’ll be making the trip Hannibal Lecter stylee.