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Week Thirty-eight, December 3-9
Sunday, December 9, 2001
The daylight hours today were spent struggling with another migraine headache. I didn't step outside until tonight, when the headache finally faded into a shadowy ache that left me feeling like I was floating through the evening as I place the recycling container next to the front sidewalk to be picked up in the morning. It is still cold and rainy. As I did my one outside chore tonight, the temperature sat at 35 degrees with rain falling...
Saturday, December 8, 2001
More cold and rainy weather greeted us today, as Natalie and I helped W and M move into their new house in the University Place area. Since I spent the morning hours watching a movie and sleeping in, and then the afternoon hours helping with the move, I didn't get a photo yet again today. I swear it is hard to remember these days that there are so few hours in which to capture a photo to mark the day. And the days are only getting shorter until the coming Winter Solstice - the day that will mark the point when I have been doing this Weblog for three-quarters of a year.
Friday, December 7, 2001
The clouds cleared enough this afternoon to offer a great winter sunset! Moments after I snapped the photo above, the sky turned to tones of dark pink and purple - too dark to capture reliably on film.
I took another walk along Puget Creek today, and once again found no signs of salmon. I think it is time to resign myself to the fact that the coho won't be back this year, even though it has been a record year for some salmon runs around the state. We are shifting our watch now to keep an eye out for chum salmon gathering along the mouth of the creek and in the lower part of the last fish ladder section where the salmon are likely to gather in their attempts to get into the upper stream. The chum have trouble making it up the last ladder, since they tend to be less aggressive spawners, so we may have to call folks from the Puyallup Indian Tribe to come and net the chum salmon and place them into the upper stream.
Thursday, December 6, 2001
I am struggling to keep up with this Weblog as the demands of the holiday season, a heavier social schedule and work come together in these last couple of weeks before Christmas. Today we received the contract for our next book, Birding Washington. It looks like we will face a deadline of Oct. 31, 2002 to wrap up the book - a schedule that sounds quite workable at this point. This time around Natalie and I plan to sketch out a detailed plan for reaching the deadline without the months-long kind of grind that we faced when writing our latest book, Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula.It will be great to have another book in the works!
Wednesday, December 5, 2001
Less than one degree was all that separated my walk in the misty and relentless rain tonight from being a pleasant walk in falling snow. I walked out the door to walk Rhia late tonight and noted that the temperature hovered around 32.5 degrees F - just a touch above freezing. But instead of watching the transition between rain and snow, it was just a cold walk in the rain.
As these days get colder and the darkness longer at this time of year, it is always surprising to see signs of brighter seasons. What flower in its right mind would make an appearance now? Apparently, the herb in the photo above, which grows in the back yard next to the rabbit hutch is not picky. The bloom is tattered from the rain and wind and snow, but it is still blooming.
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
It was another cold day today. Tonight's rain fell with snow crystals mixed in with water droplets, and we were just one or two degrees away from having a decent snow. I think that days with weather like today are the toughest in the Pacific Northwest winter, at least for someone who looks forward to snow. Instead of seeing the softness and landscape-altering blanket of snow, when I walk outside I am pelted with the coldest rain possible, a kind of rain that soaks through everything, that feels colder than the snow that would fall if the temperatures just dropped a couple of degrees and that chills me to the bone. Even for a hardy local outdoors person like me, too many days in a row like this can lead to depression...
Monday, December 3, 2001
I returned to Puget Creek to walk along the banks of the creek and search for the elusive spawning coho salmon again today, and once again I couldn't find any signs of the fish. It is still possible that the salmon will show up sometime in the early part of this month, but the likelihood drops with each day.
Even though I went on my walk around the middle of the afternoon, it was still very dark for photography. That is why, after taking a few stabs at flashed photos of the creek and some of the mostly bare vegetation along the creek, I decided to take a shot of the madrona tree that stands guard over Puget Gulch. The madrona is more prominent now that developers have wiped out the acres of trees that once topped the eastern edge of Puget Gulch, making way for a gated community. But it is fitting that the madrona is there. Another madrona stands guard over the eastern edge of Mason Gulch, closer to our home. They serve and living landmarks, denoting the natural areas nestled into the folds of the land along this southern edge of Commencement Bay.
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