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Week Thirty-two, October 22-28
Sunday, October 28, 2001
Mark today as the first frost of the season in Tacoma. Last night was cool and crisp, and there was little doubt when I went to bed around midnight that the temperatures would dip. And sure enough, when I checked the weather computer in the office it had reached 30.9 degrees overnight. It is later than usual, but the first signs of the winter to come are here.
Once temperatures rose above freezing, Natalie and I set out for an afternoon on the road. We finally stopped at Scenic Beach State Park - a place that we wanted to take a look at while we were writing Insiders Guide to the Olympic Peninsula, but we never had the time to stop. I snapped the photo above while looking across Hood Canal from the park. It shows the canal, the Dosewalips River valley and the eastern ridges of the Olympic Mountains in the background, capped with fresh snow down to a pretty low elevation.
From near Seabeck, we went over to wander the main street in Poulsbo and to see if our book was on the shelves at Libery Bay Books (it wasn't yet, but the shop owner plans to get it in now that she knows about the book). I also picked up garlic to plant at a garlic shop in town.
We were in a crunch for time, but we had one more destination in our plans before heading back to Tacoma and going to a book reading group get together. So we set out north from Poulsbo toward Point No Point. This point holds a lot of history, as a key location where treaties between settlers and the Native American tribes were signed in the early days of Washington. It also holds a lighthouse, which can be seen in the shot below. Natalie and I wandered the beach along the point, watching birds and checking out deer tracks in the sand. I have to go back to this point sometime when the sky is clear. In another photo I took this evening, even though it is hard to pick out in the shot, I can see a sailboat in the foreground, the Seattle skyline a bit further back, and the flanks of Mt. Rainier climbing up into the clouds in the distance.
Saturday, October 27, 2001
Cool and rainy describes the world outside today. Temperatures barely rose into the low 40 degree range while misty rain fell off and on throughout the day. Rather than spending time wandering in the rain, I spent my morning fighting off a headache and then getting things together for a Halloween costume. Nobody laugh...I was a jester. Fitting, I think...
Friday, October 26, 2001
Pink clouds seem to be a theme of my photography these last couple of days. This morning, just before taking Natalie off to work, I went upstairs to the roof at the back of the house to shoot the pink highlights on the clouds as the sun made its rise from behind the Cascade Mountains. The sun is still rising north of Mt. Rainier along the mountains as seen from here in Tacoma, but day by day it will progress south and rise over the southern Cascades before it reaches its southern-most point in December and starts the slow trek back northward.
It is funny. I never have been one to make special note of the location where the sun rises through the seasons, most likely because I am not up that early each morning. Every year I follow the sun's progress as it sets. I need to start getting up more in the early morning hours to get a glimpse of that side of nature.
Thursday, October 25, 2001
Besides the return to more pleasant weather (at least to the eyes of a weather watcher), fall also has some of the best lighting conditions of the year. And those long, lingering sunsets of fall are even better when the clouds part just enough to let the sun and its rays reflecting off the far off waters of the Pacific Ocean turn the undersides of the clouds pink as the day fades into night. Conditions were perfect for a pink evening today, and even though I didn't have the best vantage point to view the graduated colors of this sunset, I still had to snap a picture of the event, power lines be damned...
Wednesday, October 24, 2001
On this drizzly day I snapped a photo of a small rose covered with water droplets while out on a morning walk. Each day that passes now feels more like fall, and though we haven't had our first frost of the season yet - a few days later than normal - there is definitely a tinge of cold in the air. And once again the natural world is full of water in its many forms, with the first snows of the year in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains and with rain, fog and variations in between making nearly daily visits to the Puget Sound lowlands.
Tuesday, October 23, 2001
Fresh snow marks the Olympic Mountains this morning, making this the first day this winter that I have seen signs of winter on these familiar mountains from afar.
While snow is falling in the mountains, Natalie and I received some tentative good news today about another possible book project, this time for a book about places to do birding in Washington. It would be a fun project, if we can get the money worked out for the book deal.
Today's photo looks across Commencement Bay to the chocolate colored waters of the Puyallup River as they flow into the bay. It doesn't quite come across in this shot, but the colors of the water were great this early afternoon when I snapped this shot from the middle of 36th St., just up the hillside from Puget Creek. The bay was streaked with chocolate colors, green and blue/green.
Monday, October 22, 2001
This week opened with windy and rainy weather. We had wind gusts around 5 p.m. that reached 38 mph here at the north end of Tacoma, and other places around Western Washington topped 50 miles and hour for their top winds. We didn't lose power here in this early season storm. We did have the lights flicker now and then, but it wasn't even bad enough to make us shut off the computers.
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