04/01/2009 Ceres Creek
We had more snow, a half-inch or so of slush, this morning. After learning that my start date had been deferred from 4/06 to 4/09, giving me three extra days to finish taxes and do a bit of gardening, I decided I could afford to take a day to go rock hunting. Jim and Jerry had driven over from Yakima to look in Lucas Creek for carnelian to tumble but Pat and I persuaded them to that they would do better in Ceres Creek instead. And they did, hauling out more than half a 5-gallon bucketful each. No snow there, just cold rain now and then and cold water in the creek. It's been pretty well dug up again since the January floods rearranged all the gravel and took out the old beaver dam midway through the clearcut. Jim, at right, had brand new hip boots, one of which had a hole in it so he took a break now and then to wring out his socks. I wore my chest waders which I thought had a hole in them too but they turned out to be watertight.
In the evening Susan and I went to symphony, heard a couple pieces for violin and piano. On a piece by Shastokovich some of the audience became confused and clapped in the middle of the first movement, earning a pause of disapproval from the violinist. The pianist didn't seem to mind as much.

04/02/2009
Another symphony, this time a world premiere of a trombone concerto by the Seattle Symphony's composer in residence Samuel Jones. It was quite melodious and the trombone very expressive. The concerto reeminded me of a tuba concerto we enjoyed a few years ago, probably by the same composer; we read in the program notes that the Seattle Symphony premiered a tuba concerto by Samuel Jones in 2006 and it seems unlikely that they would play two tuba concertos by different composers in the same, or even adjacent, years.

04/08/2009 Last day of retirement
Finished taxes, owed alot less this year than last due to capital losses in the market. That must be the silver lining in the cloud that turned our 401K into a 201K (as I heard someone comment recently) over the past six months. Ran 20.6 miles at 8:45/mile. White-throated sparrow, marsh wren, yellowthroat, ruby-crowned kinglet singing. The past few days have been dry and warm, up to the mid 70's, and my hay fever has been ferocious at times. Hopefully that's the last of the worst of it now that cooler wetter air is on the way back in.

04/10/2009
I've been at work two days now and it feels really good to be back in the game again.
I went over the business requirements with Jim, the PM, again yesterday. A couple hours later, during supper, I suddenly realized that the data model is much simpler than I'd thought because there's no need to model the file hierarchy. Today we reviewed a technical spec that Ryan worked up over the past couple of days, but it focused more on the processes than on the organization of the data. The processes and file layouts were pretty much what I envisioned but I think we need to get the data model right first if the project is going to be successful. I finished a first draft of the model in Visio today and could probably have the database built and loaded in another day, but instead I'm going to take time to write up the business requirements and document the ER diagram. By reviewing those with the group I'll be able to verify that what I'm going to build will be both useable and useful for the business. Then we can plan the details of how the loads and extracts will work.
(As I described in an email to Linh this evening) I was reading some documentation on SQL Server 2008 yesterday morning when I suddenly felt a thrill of anticipation at the prospect of learning a DBMS and figuring out how to use it to organize, store and deliver data. Not that I'm not already pretty familiar with SQL Server, but learning about and working with database software was what excited me about computers when I first got into them 25 or so years ago, and it has been so long since I felt that excitement that I'd forgotten it. Also in the meeting today I realized again that I really do get data and how to organize it so a business can use it effectively - in the past few years I'd kind of lost my confidence about doing that, or perhaps forgotten that not everyone can do it. So I guess the combination of some extended time off along with a new environment and new challenges has been good for me.
Not that Expedia wasn't a great place to work. Great people, good benefits, a good situation, but somehow I got stuck and just felt stressed all the time that I wasn't being productive and couldn't catch up technically and couldn't really get engaged in the work I had on my plate. Being back at work again there's still some anxiety but so far I find it stimulating rather than intimidating.
I fixed supper for Susan for her birthday this evening since we didn't go out, and we ate at the kitchen counter surrounded by daffodils and fragrant hyacinth from the garden. Thawed out, the King salmon I froze last July still smells just as clean and fresh as when I dressed it out on the dock in Westport. I broiled it with a little olive oil, salt, pepper and tarragon. By contrast, the QFC coho is starting to smell pretty fishy - I prefer to poach that in tomato-pineapple sauce instead of broiling it.

04/11/2009 Sabbath. Ovc, 51
Though Ernie invited me yesterday afternoon to help out with his class this morning (they were planning to discuss why, or even whether, Jesus had to die), I didn't get up in time to make it. Instead I spent much of the day in the garden. After determining that fixing the flat tire on the tiller was beyond me, I tackled the winter's weeds with a spading fork instead, starting along the workshop wall and working south. By afternoon I had about a quarter of the garden worked into six beds. It would go more quickly except for picking out the fat white roots of the wild morning glory which is threatening to take over the garden. I set them aside for burning; the more benign buttercups, dandelions and chickweed go into the compost pile. After lunch and a long nap I went back out to the garden, erected chickenwire for the snap peas along the northwest edge of the garden then planted a row of peas on either side of my new fence. By dark I planted the rest of the beds (and dug one more) with cilantro, parsely, lettuce, beets, fava beans and kale. The soil is somewhat dry already but rain is forecast tomorrow.
I also picked up several yard birds during the course of the day - the first turkey vultures, a small flock of Brewer's Blackbirds, Savannah Sparrows singing across the neighbor's field and a white-throated at the feeder, and a first-ever common snipe flying over making its scratchy call at dusk.

04/12/2009 Rain, 54
We got the forecast rain, a good soaking of almost 2". I sat at the computer all day and built four new report pages on the Maniacs site, the first reports we've had out there. Maniacs by state, by country, statistics by gender and total, and the email list for Tony. Currently only administrators can see them but with approval of the Main Maniacs, I'll open the first three up to all members soon. Unfortunately I had a slight headache all day, something exercise would have cured but I didn't get any.
As often happens on rainy days in western Washington, the sky near the western horizon cleared shortly before sunset and sunlight like melted butter coated the wet daffodils and pink-flowered quince. I rushed out with my camera and snapped a few photos before drifts of pallid stratus obscured the setting sun.

04/13/2009 Ovc, Showers, 48
Productive day at work, completed the first draft of use cases and ER diagram. The commute in on 405 with no traffic already at 9AM took only 50 minutes, as opposed to an hour five on the back way via Issaquah. Another silver lining of the recession - traffic appears to have lightened up considerably.
In the morning outside the office window I saw the white-throated sparrow again. I thought maybe it had headed north, having not seen it for several weeks. Last week I heard a thin song several times which sounded like the alternate white-throated song but may just have been the golden-crowned sparrows, numerous now as they migrate through.
For Daniel's birthday we ate pizza at Ferellis near the school and watched him open several boxes from A&F. He was pleased.

04/14/2009 AM 35 with snow showers later pc, 48
At 9:00 this morning it was snowing outside - winter just doesn't want to quit. No accumulation though and by evening the sun falling below the clouds turned the still-frosted hills pink. These photos are the views north and west respectively from the same spot along the road while I was out running.

04/16/2009 Sunny, 70
Yesterday I completed coding and unit testing of the first load program, a SQL stored procedure which uses bulk insert to load a text file, the pathname of which is passed into the proc as a parameter. It took me a little longer than it otherwise might have because I used try-catch for the first time in my error handling, and made a few other changes to my customary coding style to incorporate features new in SQL 2005. So after a week of work I have the requirements documented and validated, the database designed and built, the initial data loaded and the first load procedure, which will be a template for several others, coded and tested. Time for a vacation!

Today I stayed home to get ready our trip to Boston this evening. It was a bright and balmy spring day so I opened the windows while I worked at the computer, paying bills and such. Glancing out, I noticed this chestnut-backed chickadee sunning on a branch of the spruce so I grabbed the camera and snapped a series of photos while it fluffed and preened. Later Susan and I planted the pansies she bought a couple of weeks ago, spurred to action by the prospect of flats of dead flowers on our return if we didn't get them in the ground today. I also took a few minutes to prune the taller raspberry canes. I never got around to pruning and tying them up over the winter but time is running out now that they're beginning to leaf out. Maybe I'm getting tired of raspberries.
How exciting to be packing up for a marathon again. I couldn't find my Maniac jacket so brought the black one instead, though if the forecast holds - 45 and partly cloudy - I won't need it. I decided on the red shorts I wore for my last 20 miler and packed both the long and short-sleeved red Maniac shirt but not the singlet. A short-sleeved shirt will be cool enough at the pace I'll be running, in the neighborhood of either 4 hours or 3:45, depending on whether or not I try for a qualifier. At the last minute I couldn't find the lightweight Axioms so brought the Adrenalines instead, perhaps a better choice anyhow since they're less likely to give me blisters. For the plane ride I wore my 2008 Boston jacket and hat. Boston on the weekend of the marathon is the only time I'm comfortable wearing them; any other time I feel too conspicuous.

04/17/2009 Marblehead - Sunny, 67
I slept about four hours on the Jet Blue red-eye, Susan only an hour. We picked up our Kia Optima at Budget after almost driving the wrong car, a sporty Mitsubishi Eclipse, out of the lot. The Kia felt much more appropriate. I'd hoped to visit cousin Sally in Marblehead, having not seen her in quite a few years, but found out a day or two before we left Seattle that she'd be out of town. Not knowing where else to go we drove out to Marblehead anyhow. We ate breakfast at a little cafe on the corner of Atlantic and Washington that was Brown's restaurant when I worked as a dishwasher there the fall after high school. Like almost everything in Marblehead it seemed smaller than I remembered. The streets seemed shorter and narrower and the colonial houses smaller and more tightly packed together; only the cars in the streets seemed larger than I remembered. Ironic because the cars are actually smaller than they were in the 70's.
Recalling that Linda, a friend from before high school, now lived in Marblehead, I got her number from Sarah and gave her a call. She'd love to see us but had an hour or so of painting her deck to finish up first so we walked around old town a bit then drove over to Fort Sewall where I tried to photograph birds while Susan took a nap in the sun and burned her face. We spent the afternoon with Linda and Jack, sitting on their deck overlooking a patch of woods and talking about our kids, our work, our parents and our past.
Not wanting to end our time together we invited them to join us at the Grapevine for dinner. It's been several years since we've seen Stacey I'd confirmed that she would be there when I made our reservations. At the restaurant I was surprised when Linda knew the young woman who set up our table - she's the daughter of one of Linda's close friends. When Stacey joined us part way through dinner, I was again surprised that though she and Linda hadn't met, they seemed to have a great many friends in common. Stacey was pretty busy so we arranged to meet her for breakfast before we all went our separate ways.

04/18/2009 Danvers/Boston - pc, 55
We stayed at the Comfort Inn along hwy 95 in Danvers, a quiet and comfortable place just 3 miles from the restaurant where we met Stacey for breakfast around lunchtime. We lingered for more than three hours, just talking. It was good to get caught up on the last few years. Stacey looks great; walking her Jack Russell terriers helps her stay in shape. Business is down at the restaurant due to the economy but they're making it. Her father is still doing well, living at their old house; had I known that I would have stopped in but it looked abandoned when we drove by. Last year Stacey took him to Turkey for five weeks, partially fulfilling a long-time dream of his. He'd hoped to be able to live there but wasn't quite up to it.
Mom and John had already arrived at the Harvard Club by the time we hugged Stacey good bye and headed into Boston. Thanks to their directions we found our way easily though the last half mile was pretty slow due to the convergence of traffic for the marathon expo and for both a Bruins and a Red Sox game. The salmon at the Harvard Club dining room was quite good.

04/19/2009 Boston - sunny, 60
John and I walked over to the expo in the morning so I could buy a Boston Marathon fleece sweatshirt and maybe a jacket too. We were going to get them yesterday afternoon when I picked up my packet but the line was too long. The line was even longer this morning; the half hour wait used up a good deal of our time so we didn't get to see as much of the expo as I would have liked. The only Maniacs I saw were the big 3.
I emailed Alison yesterday morning then didn't check my mail again until this morning. Fortunately she made time for us this afternoon so we drove out just in time for a casual lunch of the same tasty Felafel from Costco that I discovered about a week ago, along with carrots in a balsamic vinegar marinade, and some turkey for John. It was good. Her husband had to leave soon after lunch but Alison was able to spend the afternoon with us. She began with a tour of her garden. Their house is squarely planted on top of a little hill in a spacious (for being in town) yard partly shaded by big white oaks. Behind the house Alison has a planted a variety of early flowers which have semi-naturalized in loose drifts. Scarcely distinguishable from a patch of wildflowers in an open woods, it was just the type of garden I like. She explained that she gardens by buying bare roots in plastic bags and sticking them in the ground. She laughed as she said it. Susan was delighted when Alison told her that I was the one who inspired her interest in plants. We concluded the garden tour by admiring her "scruffy daffodils" which don't look much like daffodils at all - the flowers consist of yellow pointed tepals exploding in all directions like little fireworks.
After the garden tour we set out to walk around the Wellesley college campus. Before his father died John had arranged for him to make a gift to the college in his mother's name to fund the landscaping of the science center. He wanted to find the plaque commemorating their gift and after a pleasant walk down a sunny valley with scattered daffodils and magnolias flowering, we found it. Alison pointed out ancient white oaks spared by the early settlers' axes because their acorns provided forage for pigs. The campus was impressive, the broad lawns, the quiet lake, the stately trees and old stone buildings crowned with turrets and towers. We spotted a couple of boats out on the lake but swimming is discouraged so as to avoid stirring up toxic sediments left by an nineteenth-century paint factory.
We concluded our tour by walking through the new student center, which Alison told us had been described as an exploding building held together with duct tape We found its open design very appealing on a sunny day. I commented that the engineering must have been complicated. Apparently work had stopped in the middle of its construction, with cranes idling all around, while the architect and the contractor argued over whether or not the building could actually be built. Susan found the bookstore just before it closed and emerged with a T-shirt for Kim, who graduated from Wellesley.
We made it back to Boston just in time for our reservation at Petit Robert's Bistro. I had arranged to have Jeff and Anita and her two sisters along with Gregg and Olga and her husband Bill join us for dinner the night before the marathon. Then it turned out that Kirsten would be in Boston so she joined us too. We all met around 5:30 at Petit Robert's and had a delicious dinner. I ordered salmon and it was about as good as any I've ever had. I sat between Olga and Jeff and across from Gregg so we had a good time talking about the marathon. At the other end of the table Susan enjoyed talking with Anita and Mom and one of Anita's sisters discussed cultural sites and events in Boston.

04/20/2009 Boston Marathon - cloudy, 48
Photos from the marathon
The marathon went even better than I expected. I finished in 3:44 and took 25 photos during the race. Significant positive split this year since I ran the first half as if that's all there was. I couldn't maintain that level of effort (HR in the high 170's, 95+% of max) in the second half but that was OK because I had plenty of time; after the fast first half I only needed 9 minute miles in the second to beat my qualifying time. I had decided to carry the camera and take photos even though it might potentially jeopardize my effort to qualify. It didn't, so I'm glad I did.
Susan and I drove up to New Hampshire in our rental car since Mom and John didn't have room this time. On the way we stopped to visit Diana in Portsmouth. Alison had given us her phone number and mentioned to her that we might be stopping by. Diana is currently living in a small and uncluttered second-floor apartment in a colonial house near downtown Portsmouth. She welcomed us in and we settled on the sofa/bed in her office/living/dining room and talked about our families, our children, our work and what we remembered of our high school friendship. As she talked, and particularly as she recounted the twists and turns of her varied career, I recalled the joy of listening to Diana spin her stories. She was always so pragmatic and optimistic no matter what troubles she faced and she still has that resilience and enthusiasm. The evening passed too quickly but we'll get together again.

04/24/2009 Jackson Jackson photos, mostly birds
I purchased a new computer for John before we left for Boston, so I spent quite a bit of our three day visit getting it set up for him. No real problems except that I must have changed the wireless password and not written it down because I couldn't connect and had to call myfairpoint technical support and have them reset the router for me. The new Dell AllinOne is a big improvement over his five year old desktop, especially the large bright screen.
There wasn't much snow left around Jackson, just a few snowbanks here and there but things haven't greened up much yet. A pretty yellow Coltsfoot was the only wildflower I saw. I was pretty sore from the marathon so didn't do anything strenuous for a couple of days. On our last day I ran about four miles, mostly on the cross-country trails down to the Eagle Mountain golf course, where I ran a mile barefoot on the grass. That was very pleasant. I chased birds with the camera one afternoon around the Triangle and managed to get a few good shots. I really wanted to photograph a blue jay but they always managed to be on the opposite side of the bush from me. This trip has been the first time I've tried to use both the 18-105 and the 70-300 in the field. Though not quite as convenient as the 18-200, the results are definitely worth it. Both lenses are sharper in their range than the 18-200.

04/30/2009 Saddle Mountain Saddle Mountain flowers
I met Pat and Shirley at Saddle Mountain after work on Thursday. They'd been digging there a week earlier and had found a couple of logs, and though the easy pieces had been taken out, both logs continued down into the basalt. Pat figured we could at least get another piece of each one. I arrived at dusk and thought Pat and Shirley would have gone to bed already but they were still outside the camper. I set up my tent then we hung out and talked in their camper for a good hour or more, until I was well-chilled. I'd brought only a summer bag so I borrowed a super-warm sleeping bag from Pat and spread it over my own. Very comfy, once I finally got warm.
The sun rising into my tent at 6AM precluded sleeping in so I took camera and binoculars out into the meadows and sagebrush in search of birds. Didn't find many - a big flock of White-crowned Sparrows, widely- spaced Western Meadowlarks singing, a Loggerhead Shrike. Pat and Shirley were eating breakfast when I returned. We set out for the digging area soon after.
We worked on Pat's log from the a week ago first. He had largely dug out his hole the previous afternoon so he and I took turns picking out the basalt around the exposed end of his log. Within a couple of hours we had it out, having saved an hour or more of digging by using his hydraulic jack to break it free once we had the edge well-exposed. It took me another a couple hours of digging to clean the debris out of the other hole and expose my log, and by lunchtime I had the first chunk free. It was just small enough that I was able to heft it up to the edge of the hole, about chest-height, where Pat could reach down and pull it out. I got a second piece out, larger than the first, after lunch.
After we finished with my log we hiked down the hill to the spot we dug last May. Pat and the others had found some nice yellow-skinned limb casts down there last week but we didn't do as well this time. The limb casts had been in crumbly gray ash about three feet down, underneath a ledge of bog wood of mixed quality. We found plenty of the ash but only a few broken limb casts. My hands were feeling pretty beat up so I didn't do as much digging as I would have otherwise.

05/10/2009 sunny, near 70 Yard bird photos
Beautiful weather this weekend. I spent much of it in the garden, preparing beds. All I managed to plant was potatoes, partly because they're so easy to plant and partly because I kept running across them as I was digging the garden and felt sorry for uprooting them with their new sprouts just breaking into the sunlight. As a crop they don't make much sense for a small garden like mine - they take a lot of room and I generally only get a few meals out of them. Unlike zucchini, which also take lots of room but which feed us almost daily from mid-July to mid-October.
With mornings getting light by 5:30, I haven't been able to sleep in despite staying up nearly until midnight. I was doing very well for a few days, getting to bed by 10PM for the first time all year after camping out at Saddle Mountain, but bedtime seems to slip by a half hour every night until I'm back in my habit of staying up late. Anyhow, Saturday morning the maple tree by the corner of the back porch was full of warblers so I sat out there with my camera and tried to get photos of them. I did manage to get a few decent though distant shots but it took me several hours to warm up again after I came in. Sunday morning I dressed more warmly and got more photos, including a first-ever yardbird - a black-throated gray warbler, along with several warbling vireos and orange-crowned warblers. The nice thing about using the camera is that I can study their appearance at my leisure rather than trying to chase after glimpses through binoculars. The differences between the vireos and the orange-crowned warblers didn't become apparent to me until I examined my photos.

05/17/2009 sunny, 77 Wheezer Obituary
Another beautiful weekend. Daniel and David finished school and came home for the summer. Nearly fifteen weeks ahead with no homework, no papers and few responsibilities. Today David brought Monica, a climbing friend, home and Susan fixed a nice lunch - baked eggplant and garlic bread - which we ate at the new wrought-iron table for four on the back deck in the sunshine.
Yesterday, and Friday morning too, I sat on the back porch and took more bird photos - missed a few a good shots but got a few too. The best one I missed was a close-up of the male black-headed grosbeak on a sunny branch; the chestnut-backed chickadees drove him off just a second before I could get the lens on him. But on the other hand, I did capture the white-crowned sparrows having sex, and photographed the goldfinch pair as well as a Nashville warbler which I didn't realize I'd seen until I looked at the photo.
When we arrived home yesterday Wheezer was lying on his side out in the sun with his legs extending uphill and his eye wide open, staring at the sun. "Wheezer's dead," I said. After lunch David and I rolled him into the wheelbarrow (I rolled, David took pictures) and wheeled him up the driveway to the garden path. I chose that site for his burial because the topsoil is deeper there than anywhere else on the property. It took about an hour to dig a 2'x4' hole about 5' deep and another hour to cover him up. Striper didn't show any sign of missing his former significant other until this afternoon when he began bawling after David and Monica walked by on their way down toward the river. He wasn't hungry and he wasn't caught in the fence and he stopped as soon as he could see me out on the back porch, so I think he was lonely. I find myself noticing Wheezer's absence too, not that I'm particularly sad; just that it doesn't seem right to have only one goat.

05/18/2009 AM ovc 55, PM sunshine, evening rain
After a quiet day yesterday we had lots of warblers around today - all Yellow, Wilson's and Townsend's. As soon as I went out on the back porch this morning I spotted two singing Yellow Warblers in the maple tree and heard another one singing nearby. When I came back out with the camera all I could find were Wilson's Warblers, the Yellows having moved north to the fir trees and out of sight. I did get several shots of the Black-headed Grosbeak, a one-eyed male Brown-headed Cowbird and the resident robin. Hearing Wilson's's singing out towards the driveway I decided to try the living room window by the swallow box. Good decision - during several sessions over the next couple of hours I took about 500 photos of mostly female Townsend's and male Wilson's warblers, some of them only about six feet away. Unfortunately almost all of the shots were motion-blurred; I shoot at F11 which on an overcast morning means shutter speeds generally between 1/30 and 1/100 at ISO 500, not fast enough to stop active warblers. Still, I managed to get a few really good images, far better than any previous photos I've taken of warblers. I noticed that the two species generally seemed to divide up the foraging area - the Townsend's out near the tips of the branches and the Wilson's more towards the interior of the spruce tree, though there was some overlap. On the maple tree all the warblers forage out in the flower/leaf clusters at the tips of the branches. I wish now that I'd tried to photograph the Orange- crowned Warblers from the living room window because they often foraged in the spruce. I heard them singing around the house all last week but they seem to have moved on, along with the Yellow-rumped, because I didn't see or hear either species this morning.
On another bird note, we seem to have three species of swallows nesting around the house this year - Tree swallows in a box in the garden, Violet-green in the box at the corner of the living room and Barn swallows in the carport. Several times while I had my camera sticking out the living room window one or the other of the Violet-green swallows hovered in front of my lens - too close for a photo at 300mm.
With all the distractions at home I didn't get to work until 2PM. I spent 5 hours on a series of queries mapping the exclude reasons associated with about 400,000 files over to about 5,000 subdirectories in which those files reside. Finished the queries but didn't make any progress on my primary task - documenting the system. As I told David, who had three papers to write last week, my job this week is writing a 10 page paper about the system I've built. He asked if anyone would read it; I told him probably not, but it still had to be good.

05/21/2009 Sunny, 70
I didn't get to work very early today, distracted in the morning by photographing birds again. Once there I had a productive day though, wrote about a third of the user guide which I had intended to work on yesterday until a serious performance issue with processing subdirectory exclusions cropped up. I spent all day adding a step to the file load to parse out and store all subdirectories and file-subdirectory associations for all files in the load so I could do a direct match on subdirectory rather than using like, which turned out to be painfully slow when the number of subdirectory exclusions began to grow. Parsing the subdirectories for a million files takes 10 minutes or so, but doing so accelerated the calculation of subdirectory exclusions for 5000 subdirectories from several days to several seconds.
Yellow warblers have been singing in the maple tree for the past three days but today was the first time I've been able to get photos of them. For some reason they're harder to spot and track in the tree than the other warblers, though their song is among the loudest of them all. I finally got my best shots from the roof - wish I'd tried that for the other warblers too but that will have to wait until next year. On the roof I'm almost right in the crown of the maple. While I was up there I tried to get photos of the swallows in flight but that will take more practice. The trick seems to be to track with my free eye, keeping the lens hood an inch (measured at the hood) behind the flying bird and just trust that as I do so, the bird will be in the viewfinder. The Tree Swallow makes it easier for me by sitting on the post in the garden near their box, where the female is on eggs.

05/22/2009 Sunny, 72 West Tiger
Last day of work, though I didn't work much and it actually isn't my last day. I'm returning the week of the 15th-19th ofJune, and in the meantime I still have to finish the user's guide over the next few days. But today Jeff and I hiked up Tiger and David and Monica joined us. Monica spent the night even though both Daniel and Susan had a stomach bug. She didn't have anywhere else to go for the day between finishing her Outdoor Leadership training course and her flight home to Delaware, and she likes it here.
After falling a bit behind Jeff and me on the way up the cable line trail, David turned left onto the TMT instead of continuing straight up. We were on the summit when he called on his cell phone, having realized that he was probably lost. I told him to return the way he came and we would meet him at the car, and we did. We were a little late getting Jeff back to work but he didn't seem to mind too much. I spent about a half hour in the office then we ate supper at the Indian restaurant next to Performance Cycle, where I bought a few things while we waited for the restaurant to open for supper. We lingered so long over supper that we followed Monica's airport shuttle down our road and up our driveway. In just 9 minutes we got her packed up and on her way.

05/23/2009 Sunny, 72 Rattlesnake Lake
In the morning I drove out to Rattlesnake Lake to meet with the biologist there, who also coordinates event usage of the Recreation Area. He suggested that I consider having my start and finish at the Iron Horse State park trailhead so as to avoid having to get a City of Seattle permit. We drove over and looked at the parking lot - 57 stalls not including the lightly-used horse trailer parking area. If I have about 70 runners and used the upper gravel lot of the Rattlesnake Lake parking area as overflow that might work. There were a couple of reasonably good places where we could have our finish area and serve lunch. We tried calling the state park but received no answer; budget cutbacks have made the remaining employees hard to reach.
Afterwards I wandered around with my camera trying to photograph birds. I managed a photo of a red-breasted sapsucker and a couple of a warbling vireo but missed more than I got. I followed gated gravel roads in from down the road a couple hundred yards from the Rattlesnake parking entrance, passed a brushy marsh with lots of Swainson's thrushes, then back up towards the mountains to another wetland, a shallow pond surrounded by old alders with Salmonberry understory. Hooded Merganser and Mallards, maybe a Gadwall, out on the water and Warbling Vireos, Wilsons Warblers, Black-headed Grosbeaks, robins, Yellowthroats around the edges. I skulked through the Salmonberry feeling frustrated by my inability to move quietly but enjoying the sunshine and the new foliage of spring nonetheless. On the east side of the wetland I found a path and followed it south up onto the Iron Horse trail maybe a third of a mile above the trailhead. Shortly before I reached the parking area, after pausing to photograph a towhee, I heard a peregrine kakking overhead but couldn't spot it. Based on the direction the sound came from, the bird was some distance east or even northeast from the ledge so maybe it was alarmed by an eagle and not by the colorful crowd on top of the cliff.
After lunch I hung out on the back porch and was eventually rewarded with a couple of opportunities for close-ups of Wilson's Warblers in the maple tree. That seems to be the only warbler still around. Towhees, Song sparrows, Chestnut-backed chickadees and a flock of young House Sparrows also visited the feeder. A Starling flew in several times but left hastily upon spotting me.

05/26/2009 AM ovc 50, PM partly cloudy, 70 Mt Pete
On David's insistence Daniel and I hiked up Mt Pete with him today. We didn't head over there until after lunch when the clouds had thickened and scattered gray curtains of rain had begun to drop off to the southwest. We did a loop on the back side, up to the right and down the old road along the west side of the "mountain". I carried my camera in hopes of finding some birds and did - a White-crowned Sparrow on the way up and a Wilson's Warbler on the way down. The Wilson's call was unfamiliar, a loud, thick "chk", but the bird itself was quite unwary. A Bald Eagle soared overhead as we returned to the car.
It seems as though everything is blooming right now. The yellow Scotch Broom is at its peak along Mud Mountain Road at the trailhead. Wild blackberry, strawberry, thimbleberry and chokecherry(?)are all flowering in the open areas along the lower part of the trail and serviceberry is blooming around the summit. I also noticed a nice magenta/purple wild pea and bluish-purple Penstemon along the first part of the road up.
On the way home I had David drive so I could take photos out the passenger side window. We stopped for fields bright yellow with buttercups and along 464th where I noticed Lazuli Buntings singing on Sunday when I rode past on my bike. I found the Lazuli Bunting foraging and singing in the ditch along the side of the road, so close it startled me and I scared it up into the cottonwoods. Fortunately it dropped down again, still singing, so I was able to find it and get a few pictures. That was a nice surprise; I didn't expect to get anywhere near it.

White-crowned Sparrow

Wilson's Warbler

Mourning Dove

Lazuli Bunting

05/27/2009 Sunny, 70 
The cat tangled with an oppossum and lost. She has a shunt on her rump to facilitate draining of her bite wounds back there and while the shunt is in place, she has to wear a collar like a plastic megaphone around her neck. Not only does it prevent her from disturbing the shunt, but it also gets caught on the door mouldings when she tries to slink around corners. She's clearly puzzled about it but doesn't lose her temper. Rather than board her at the vet's during our trip to New Hampshire, we decided that Susan would stay home to take care of her so just the boys and I will go to visit my folks.
Hannah came up to visit Daniel on her way to see a friend in Seattle. Susan baked a lemon meringue pie for the occasion and we had sat at our new wrought iron table from Costco and ate a nice lunch in the sunshine. Afterwards David and I photographed flowers around the yard. Daniel is starting to take more of an interest in photography too. He's using David's D40 so we won't put it up for sale on eBay just yet.