Thanksgiving - NW Island style

The holiday got off to a rough start around here - with Caz Z eating a full pecan and half a pumpkin pie off the counter Thanksgiving morning. So of course the pie fiasco led to your typical holiday emotional breakdown - which for me involves being ridiculously homesick for friends, skiing, and thanksgiving in DJ. But the day improved dramatically and I had a great meal/day with Steph and friends in Seattle. Then came back and spent a wet but gorgeous weekend on Orcas Island with Audrey. It was a great blast from the past, I hadn't been out there since I worked a summer there as a kayak guide in... 1993?? Am I really that old? Much has changed, but the island still has remarkable charm.

we did get out for a long hike, but with the wet weather we also leisurely enjoyed the great bookstore and coffee shop and got in lots of knitting. here we are enjoying the most decadent mexican hot chocolate you can imagine, stalling out before going back to a wet tent.

As homesick as I may be, I must say I LOVE the mornings here. After years of winter darkness in Fairbanks, having the sun rise @ 7 am here feels so decadent! This is our campsite, pretty sure we were the only ones camping in all of moran state park, not bad considering the unseasonably warm weather here these days.

we thought about buying this beauty for morgan...

the wet season is here

favorite past-time in the office this last week has been checking the hydrograph of the Skagit river. Watching the predicted curve shoot up into the phase III orange flood zone is exciting, when you're in a dry office. The Stilliguamish - one delta South of here - flooded heavily, further upriver flooded, but mt vernon was spared.... for this fall storm at least.


in other news... Auds is here for a month. I'm so glad to have a good friend around, and she's glad to have a comfy place to recover. She just had a surgery last week, she donated a kidney. It's been amazing to see this whole process. The surgery itself was no big deal by Audrey standards (and thanks to the drugs no doubt). but she's had some major complications from the surgery which were not anticipated and were a big deal. Just hanging out with her in the hospital during one particularly bad bout of pain last week I was so struck but what an amazingly selfless act she had made. Seems as humans we have this innate tendency towards selfishness, but really Auds just proved we're capable of so much more.

Howard (the recepient) is doing great. He started peeing within a few hours of surgery, is eating black beans... things he hasn't done in years. I've never been so blown away by the miracles of modern medicine. We all of course had wished Dea could have been the recipient but it just wasn't a good match. But Howard has a young daughter and Audrey's gift to her is no less than if it had been Dea.

election night, la conner style

a bit late, but a great story...
i was a bit disappointed election night. i walked down to the brewery to watch the results come in and see it live on tv. history in the making, how could there only 3 people at the bar? that is so la conner, dead. dead. not that i'm a big fan of crowds but i really wanted to be in grant park, not the la conner brewery.

so a few nights ago i went to a book signing event for a local author - tom robbins. (as in - Even Cowgirls get the Blues). He looked strangely familiar... If only I had known at the time that I spent a historical night with my neighbor Tom Robbins!