Today we spent a pleasant afternoon with my parents in Seattle’s International District; they hadn’t visited the new megaUwajimaya and Mom was in the market for some Vietnamese fish sauce. Viv and I had been to the store previously but hadn’t really wandered around it.

It’s huge. The fish they have on display in range and price was competitive to what’s available at the Pike Place Market, notably including sole for well under $5/lb. I ended up with a (non-oriental) barbeque grilling basket and a bottle of sale-price sake. Mom found her fish sauce and picked up food for the plane as well.

We wandered down the street and had pho for lunch, and foud some inexpensive ceramic bowls to use as cat food and water containers. Then we headed for SeaTac to see my parents off. The airport was not very busy, somewhat to my surprise.

In the morning the Blue Angels had been performing over our house, and in one memorable moment I experienced the sound and sight of an F-16 blasting full throttle from 500 feet away as the pilot stood his plane on end and began a loop. The tailpipes were pointed right at me.

On our return drive from the airport I noticed two miltary grey F-16s maneuvering fast, in following formation, and at about 300 feet over the freeway and nearby suburban areas. I immediately experienced concern. The jets continued to chase around our field of view, clearly distracting the freeway full of cars, for several minues, before coming low with gear extended in preparation for a landing at Boeing Field.

They were just a part of the Seafair festivities.

The day before I noted a military grey MiG flying low and south over our house at about 6 pm, presumably also coming to Boeing Field.

The Blue Angels retain their entertainment value for me; it was interesting to note how these unconventional airplane sightings, otherwise a source of joy for me in the past, provoked a more complex reaction this year.

My mom and dad are visiting so, um, some light posting is probable.

I will give them my best for you!

Today we drove all over lovely industrial south Seattle, and stopped by the Museum of Flight to gawk at the Blue Angels. My Dad told a story about working for Boeing as an aerospace engineer right after college, and a set of flight trials that I think he helped design. We looked at pretty airplanes designed to kill people and break things.

I think tomorrow is when the Angels start practicing for the shows this weekend – I think it’s kind of neat that my dad will be here for that. Unlike many denizens of my neighborhood, I love the jets.

They drove out here from North Carolina over that last week. I had hoped to travel with them, but the courtyard social scheduling conflicted with the trip, and so I chose to remain here.

On Saturday I organized a little get-together for everyone that lives in our apartment building. Our building is relatively small – seven units – and is a very pleasant place to live, so tenant turnover tends to be slow. One of our neighbors has always made it a point to be freindly with everyone in the building, if possible, and he’d been away for a good while housesitting.

Thanks to our housesitting neighbor, we’d met several of the other tenants and become friendly – which can be helpful when you’re chasing pot-smoking teenagers away from the dumpster or need your cats watched while you gallivant around the country.

While our neighbor was gone, two apartments rolled over, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to introduce the new tenants to everyone, as well as begin to build community with the other long-term tenants.

Well, as it turned out, most everyone showed up, we all had a great time, and there is talk of another before the end of the summer. Our courtyard is a very beautiful place to spend an afternoon. i had a great time, and it seemed like everyone else did too.

OK, it’s like this.

About two weeks ago we decided to host a small wingding for just the people that live in our apartment building. That’s at one pm today. About half the tenants will be there to start but we expect more later.

About a week and a half ago, we arranged to get our apartment demolded (this last winter was particularly cold and wet and the black mold showed up, bags in hand, and moved in).

About a week ago, my parents called and told me they were driving out here from North Carolina. We expect them, um, sometime this afternoon.

The demolding is in process and will be continuing, also today. Our apartment is torn up (but the guest room is clean and ready)!

Everything in the house is in utter, move-in-style disarray.

So, like I said. No rain but the deluge.

These things come in threes, right?

ACT ONE

Last week, I was corresponding with the estimable Chris Dent, who

• lives in the childhood home of my oldest friend, Eric Sinclair
• developed the verry interesting wiki variant warp
• is a good egg.

Eric’s family home is one of the houses I have very strong childhood sense memories of, including detailed smells, rocking out to music I’d flee from today (well, most of it), cold pepperoni pizza breakfasts with flat, watery coke after all-night D&D marathons, and the assorted associations of the initial glimmerings of adolescence. I have a very clear memory of devouring “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” overnight, and a repeated one of listening to all the seventies Firesign Theatre records on vinyl – did you know one of those standard, single-LP releases had three sides? Verry trippy! Flip it over and which side plays? You never knew!

Chris lets me know that he’ll be visiting the glorious Pacific Northwest for about ten days in mid-to-late August. He’ll be traveling in company with his romantic interest, one Sabrina, who, he tells me, once lived here in Seattle.

Well, one thing leads to another, and I’m looking at Sabrina’s blog. While the look
of it is unfamiliar, there’s something about it that makes me think I’ve read it before.

I start scanning backwards, and bingo! I find some posts from early in 2002, when she was getting ready to move to Bloomington for grad school. I recall looking at them at the time she was writing them and being jealous that she’d essentially gotten an invitation to apply for grad school from a prof she had as an undergrad. Come to think of it, I’m still jealous. 😉

So, interestingly, Sabrina moves from author of random blog I once glimpsed for a moment to person who intersects directly with my life and childhood in countless ways, in one easy step.

ACT TWO

This weekend Vivian and I decamped for camping in the San Juans. It was a lovely jaunt, which is detailed in another entry or two.

On the way back, we knew that there’d be a considerable wait for the return ferry. We ended up sitting behind a group of slightly-younger-than-us-folks that looked vaguely familiar, for no readily apparent reason. Right next to us was a friendly lady with a black lab puppy who was talking to everyone around her. The mood of the waiting crowd was festive – it was a gorgeous hot summer day and we were all about to take a free boat ride through some of the most beautiful scenery in the Northwest.

Once we disembarked from the ferry and headed back to Seattle, the only down note was the customary summer Sunday-afternoon return commute traffic on I-5.

Then, on Tuesday, I was idly clicking through the links to the right of this entry, mostly blogs, to catch up. This activity reminds me of flipping through bins of records or comics, in search of the new or interesting.

Then I clicked on the link titled “Statanic Action“. In the entry I clicked into, the author, Stacey Lester, describes attending a wedding in the San Juans, on Orcas Island, where Viv and I had been camping. He spent the night, and then, anticipating a 3-hour wait for the ferry (accurately), hung out with his pals on a hill overlooking the ferry dock.

Which is exactly when and where Viv and I were doing the same thing.

Stacey even promptly (more promptly than me, I tells ya) posted his pictures of the weekend which, you guessed it, includes this shot of the dog lady… with me in the upper right corner.

The last time I was involved in anything comparable to this fascinating chain of coincidence and probability was in the middle of Seattle’s world-famous WTO festival of early winter, 1999. The day after shooting it, someone posted video footage of the Wednesday evening (December 1, 1999?) tear-gas and stinger-grenade clearage of the street near the reservoir in my neighborhood. You (by which I mean I) can make out my blurry figure and hear my voice just as a stinger grenade slams into the cameraman’s hand, busting a finger (and, though not on the video, chapping my ass quite nicely).

The current synchronies are much preferable, and have not involved bleeding.

So the query is, is that three? Or need I look anew to the future, yet unwrit?

I’ve completed processing my pix from our camping trip to the San Juans, and posted the results here. While I have broken the pictures down into sections, a highlight reel may be called for. In this entry, the small pix are linked into the pix.whybark.com album they come from, so click the thumb once to get to the album, find the thumb on the page, and click again to enlarge. (hm, I gotta come up with a better context and focus strategy than that, huh?)

Our campsite was located at the south end of idyllic Lake Cascade, in Moran State Park on Orcas Island. Moran State Park was created in the 20’s when Robert Moran, a wealthy shipbuilder and former mayor of Seattle, gave the property to the just-formed state park system. The park lacks a single element of astonishing presence such as Mt. Rainier or the Olympic Range, but it’s still a truly astonishing site.

Our campsite afforded us this lovely mirrored sunset. Later that night I was able to observe the stars of the Big Dipper reflected in the lake. In fact, each night I saw numerous satellites, and each night, I saw one meteor.

A short hike from camp up a very steep trail brought us to this viewpiont above the lake, known as Sunrise Rock. In this view, our tent is not visible; it’s hidden by the greenery just above and to the right of the small blue and white tent seen in the photo (in the thumb, that tent is a tiny light colored dot in the shade, to the lower right).

Within the park, there’s a moderately tall (2409 ft) peak named Mount Constitution, the highest peak in the San Juan Islands. On a perfectly clear summer day (such as the day of our visit) you can see as far as Vancouver BC to the north and to Rainier to the south. Mount Baker, however, is the closest of Washington’s grand and towering volcanos, and as such dominates the view. One may drive up the twisty road as we did, or opt for the four and a half mile hike up the mountain. At the summit is a cool-looking replica of a 12th century Balkan watchtower that is open to the public and from which most of the images of views on my pix.whybark.com album were shot.

Also an easy hike directly from our campsite is the picturesque, modestly-scaled Cascade Falls, which felt pretty damn good by this time in the heat of the day. On our return, we took a service road which immediately felt as though we’d taken a wrong turn and ended up backstage at Disneyland. We kept joking that the security guards would jump out and haul us away, or that we’d see animatronic wildlife piled up, rusting by the side of the road.

Instead of animatronic graves (NEWS FLASH: The Country Bears opens Friday!!!) we came across piles of discarded picnic benches, charcoal grills, and firepits; it was literally refreshing to see something that was not a perfect postcard for nature, warm and fuzzy in beauty and balance.

Not to worry, however, nature let us know that she’s the boss when at 4 am on the first night, a huge windstorm kicked up. I woke up and scurried about in the gale moving light stuff, soaking our firepit, and generally feeling helpless before nature’s fury. I then lay in bed sleeplessly as the tent tugged and pitched in the breeze. The wind died by midday, but then began anew at promptly midnight and was still in action when we left at about noon on Sunday.

I’m reasonably confident that when I say “huge windstorm” I mean larger than me. If I had been in a house and not a tent I doubt I would have been much concerned by the gusts.

On our last day, we packed up the camp and took a nice, five or six mile walk around the rim of the lake via the Lake Cascade Loop trail, and then hit the road and summer Sunday afternoon traffic back to Seattle on I-5. It was, all in all, a deeply pleasant camping experience.

This is lovely Cascade Lake, where our campsite was located. Man, the San Juan Islands are beautiful! Not that this is, like, a secret.

Why hello! Nice to see you!

Viv and I took the ferry to Bremerton and drove north and then east to Sequim bay, where we camped in the lovely (but not spectacular) Sequim Bay State Park. Then the next day we drove up the road a few miles to the Port Angeles entrance to Olympic National Park, and drove up to Hurricane Ridge for a pic-a-nic.

There were some highly aggressive chipmunks, who, I’m happy to say, got nothing (and liked it, natch).

Such as this one.

You can page through all the pix here.

We’ll be out and about enjoying something similar to this until Sunday evening. Sorry you can’t join us.