January

Maybe it is because the days are short. Some of the things that happen in January are .... well, strange. For example, last weekend Amy had her friend Lily over to our house. They were driven (?) to canine behavior. Somehow they cooked up the idea of having an eating contest. It

couldn't be just any old eating contest, but rather an eating contest without using their hands. I am not sure what they all ate, but I do know that they downed a can of peach chunks and and can of pineapple chunks. When reduced to the ordinary, Amy is engaged in the usual things like school, piano lessons, and ballet. Tomorrow is a day off from school, and we plan to go boarding/skiing.

Dan came to visit on Tuesday the 13th. Now that is not strange, but after his flight from Albany to Portland he had a 5 hour layover before his flight to Redmond and he .......... missed his flight! When he didn't show up and I asked about his flight at the Redmond airport, they said "his luggage is here but we don't know where he is". It turns out he fell asleep and didn't hear the boarding announcement; fortunately there was another flight 3 hours later.

One of the things that we did when he was here was eat strange burgers. We went to a restaurant that served, among other things, kangaroo burgers, Tibetan yak burgers, and antelope burgers. We ordered one of each and then shared so that each of us could check them out. I think that we all decided that we would stick with beef. Dry and not very tasty come to mind.

The weather has been strange in that it has been all over the map. For about a week, it was sunny and in the 50's so that Dan and I rode bikes down in the canyon with faithful Charles getting a good workout running beside and ultimately after us .... with his tongue hanging way out the side of his mouth. (I am trying to coach him to become a great fighter, and he has to do the roadwork to build up his endurance.) A few days after that, we had freezing fog descend upon us. As you can see from the photo of a tree beside our house, it looked like the tree

had grown needles of ice that look like needles on a conifer tree. Even Charles had ice needles growing out of him during our daily walk! (Click on the picture to make it full screen


so that you can see it better.) Doesn't he look like a great fighter? Well, actually he is very sensitive and is known to whine and cry on a daily basis, especially when he thinks his master may have commanded him to stay in a certain spot. Just kidding about the great fighter part, but not kidding about the whining.

A little later on our walk that day, we missed getting a picture of another strange thing. While walking on a service road in the canyon, a beast as big as a large horse came trotting toward us. Nancy's response was "WHAT IS THAT?!" Its antlers spread out at least as far as my arms will spread so I knew it wasn't a horse. So we saw our first elk out in the "wild". We were glad when it made a 90º turn; Charles gave half-hearted chase, but he seemed to be relieved when it became apparent that he wasn't going to catch this thing.

A little digression on elk. Shortly after we had moved in last year, a lady who lives some miles east of here in ranch country came to pick up empty boxes that we had advertised on Craigslist. She has a long shared driveway (10 miles?) and one morning she saw a herd of elk running up ahead of her. Someone behind her passed her and ended up in the path of the elk. Their vehicle was totaled. Apparently running elk don't stop for anything. That doesn't mean the elk charge after people, but nonetheless that is why we were relieved to see the elk turn away from us.

Here is a photo of Dan just before he left to go back to SF to finish his last semester at USF where he is working on an MBA. He took one of our cars because the lease on the Jeep


that he has been driving was expiring. To continue with the theme of strange, he had an awful time finding a dealer that would accept his leased Jeep even though the lease agreement stipulated that it could be turned in to any dealer. After lots of phone calls to Chrysler Credit Corp (the lessor) and a passionate (kind word) phone call with a dealer in Oakland that Chrysler Credit Corp had told him would take the Jeep, he finally got it off his hands. According to the dealer, the Jeep will just sit on the back of their lot for many months before Chrysler Credit Corp will do anything with it. I guess this is just an example of a messed up economy.

On to some things that are less strange. Miz Nancy is working on a heritage scrapbook for/of her father. She completed one for her mother a couple of years ago so it is time to do one for her father. Here she is diligently working away (actually not; it was a posed picture!).


While she has been scrapbooking, I have had some fun working on technical challenges posted at innocentive.com. Innocentive collects descriptions of technical problems that companies want solved and then looks for people to propose how to solve the problems. It is just like being back at work, and that is fun. If someone has the winning proposal, they get paid and if you don't have the winning proposal ..... well, it is a fun exercise to stay intellectually engaged.

Another not so unusual thing is that we had a couple inches of "feathers" fall last weekend. We took some pictures on our walk the next day and got this rather nice shot of Mt Bachelor where we will go skiing tomorrow. On some days, clouds mysteriously skirt the mountains making

for some beautiful scenery. Here is one final shot of me standing beside the river that day. There


is a trail that follows along the river on both sides, and we often walk on each side crossing the river on a couple of foot bridges that are separated by about a mile and a half. If you do the math, that means we walk 3-4 miles through the various micro-climates that are down in the canyon. For example, I am standing in a swampy area full of reeds in the picture above with a Pacific Northwest forest and volcanic outcroppings on the other side of the river.