February News
Holy Tree, Batman! I enjoyed the acorn stash tree photo with all those snacks just waiting for the woodpeckers to come collect them.
Mom, your snowy tree gives us a pretty good indication of why you haven’t been out and about much last month. With snow ice and cold weather like you have been having it is much safer to just stay tucked in warm and cozy at home. Now that you have finished “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie”, can you share with us what that sweetness was?
Paul, that beautiful bay gracing last month’s cover is indeed a bay off the Baltic Sea. The Baltic Sea is fresh water but since it flows right into the ocean it is lightly salted as a result. So, you get slightly salty fish out of there! I’ll let you figure out what kind of fish that might be. How was the Portland Sportsman Show this year?
Diana and Maggie, if you still are on the trail of Lewis and Clark – O the Joy! – a wonderful book to read about their journey is “Undaunted Courage” by Stephen Ambrose. I think it is so amazing that L&C’s team made that journey into the unknown and back again with the loss of only one man. And, at that, it was early in the journey, and due to appendicitis, so the poor man would have died whether he was traipsing in the wilderness or not. Ambrose obviously loves his subject matter and his book is a really great read. By the way, did you remember that Seaman took the journey also? He’s a Newfoundland like Kodiak and Kodiak has a book about Seaman’s adventures. If you find Ambrose’s book too intimidating, give “Seaman’s Journey” by Patti Reeder Eubank a try. Good luck to Dan on finding the next job. It is pretty tough right now with the economy still so depressed.
We found Stev’s Ice Age photo in the Polish magazine. Greg used his Google Toolbar to translate the article. Its title is Catastrophic Thaw. The computer translated the rest of the article and we got a pretty good laugh at the translation. We got the gist of the story but the actual language was pretty funny. The computer translates the words literally. Did Stev get his $50 and was that in Polish funds??? I hope Sepia’s ear infection has cleared up. Any of you with kitties know what a huge to do it is to get medicine into a sick one. When we were babysitting Kodiak after his surgery, he had to take 20 pills a day. I groaned when I first heard about that, immediately thinking of trying to get a pill down Jasmine, but puppies are a whole different story. Get that cheese out and pills go right down. Come on, 20 wasn’t enough – give me some more!
Jenny, it is very exciting to think of you in your last semester of school. I knew the snow was getting pretty deep back your way and things were getting desperate but I didn’t realize how bad it was until you told us you were eating puppy chow!
Julie and Matt, I bet you especially enjoyed your trip to Jamaica last month as a very welcome break from all that snow and blizzard and ice and cold you had. The pictures in the paper were hard to believe. You really couldn’t have gotten ALL that snow, could you?
I am glad to hear that you are back to work Heather even though that arm still has some healing to do. Take special care so you don’t re-injure your arm.
Tim, your bird photos are wonderful. Sorry about the technical error on your contribution last month. As you know, we rarely hear from you, so to get the original two-pager from you was a downright long winded discourse. Who would have thunk you have FIVE WHOLE PAGES in ya????? Well, it looks like the birds are doing it to you and I can see why. I don’t know much about birds so when you find out what the big to-do over the pine warbler is, you will have to fill us in. Is one of the four birds you sent for the newsletter the pine warbler? It’s fun to hear you sing the praises of snow. You love the stuff while most everyone else is bad mouthing it. I enjoyed all the family ice skating adventures – even the wet ones.
February brought us snow on four different days. Three of them were short lived, but the other one gave us 4 inches and the temps fell into the teens so the white stuff stayed with us. We were babysitting Kodiak again when we got the big -for us - snow. Kodiak loves the snow and it was fun to watch him romping in the backyard and chomping away trying to catch the snowflakes in his mouth. He would come in to warm up a bit and them was ready to run out again. The falling snow was even better than his tennis ball for entertainment.
Greg started right in doing taxes the beginning of the month and they were swamped the first few days. Things have slowed down a bit and are more manageable now. His favorite customer so far has been Trixie, the tattooed lady. She was pretty well covered in tattoos.
I have continued working on my Architecture Survey project. I did another group of houses doing the field work inventory. I am up to 50 houses now. Then we had a workshop to start in on phase 2 which identifies homeowners. We use a directory (Polk Directory) in the Clark County Historical Museum to look up an address and the directory provides us the name of the homeowner for that year. There is a stack of these books by year and then once we have the name we start to look in books in prior and later years to try to identify who lived there and for how long and it also it tells the occupation of the owner. The attractiveness of this phase is that it is INDOORS and out of the cold and rain.
Have you noticed that the days are getting longer? We are up to 11 hours and 3 minutes of daylight as February comes to a close. That’s up from 8 hours and 46 minutes the beginning of January. Woo hoo!! Come on Springtime!
Love,
Carol and Greg
