Home Tennis Match
As of press time, authorization to publish pictures of Becky's tennis match had not been cleared, so some pictures from the boys' matches are being substituted.

It looks a little scarey to be on the receiving end when Eric is at the net. He and Kyle had a thrilling match. They lost the first set 1-6, won the second set 6-0 and went on to win the third set.

I don't know how Darton fared, but look at that form!
Post press time news: they won.

Positive Reinforcement
Yesterday Dan did NOT get stressed by the following things:
I did not start dinner early enough
I did not have time to drop off his prescription
I took Gwen shopping for college-girl necessities.

Speaking of genes...what sort of primitive recessive gene induces someone to sit in chairs in this manner? Or, perhaps the rest of us have yet to discover it as a yoga pose that aids in digestion.

Here's what everyone is doing:
Gwen is chatting online. Or else getting ahead on next quarter's hard classes by studying now.

Dan is asking me about the most important topic in the world - dinner - oughtn't I buy more lettuce?
Then he is annoyed because while in Anacortes I was forced to use a different bank's cash machine. So we will be charged a whole dollar and fifty cents. Did I try looking in a phone book for a nearby branch????

Becky is not back from her tennis match, but I reach her on her cell and she is going right to a friend's house to study.
(No photo of this.)

Other girls doing their thing. The Theatre.



Everyone thinks it is so glamorous to be a star, but these girls know its a lot of hard work. A lot of practice - including a lot of practice on stripper moves. They got a standing ovation from a full-house audience.
Good Work!

Girls
Doing their thing, bouncing

The twin sisters reunited

Yay! Gwen is home!
She was so exhausted from her finals that she fell asleep on the sofa with Mew-mew guarding her.

Skyline View

This is from my collection of skyline and downtown Seattle photos I'm amassing for the upcoming RE-SOLVE website.

Cousins
Was this moment an augury? Jessica has been Gwen's mentor for her first year at UCSD.

Spring
An infrared photo symbolizing spring, but without any color.

Better - but could still be improved if I had more time - I know they are not that pale. And I'll bet Anthony was not wearing white pants.

Is Julie pulling my leg? She said the picture of them at the tennis courts "was one of the worst I'd ever seen of us", and this other picture was "better."
I'll see if I can improve it on Photoshop.

10:30 am: Dan and I return from a walk. The only way I knew the girls had, in fact, arisen, was the absence of some muffins and the decorative retainers on the counter.

This was the view from Dan's hospital room. He related to a cat in the window of the apartment building across the street, a life of sleeping a lot and watching birds. The doctor gave Dan a choice. He could stay in the hospital another day and have more tests or he could go home. He decided to go home.

On the ferry ride home as we considered possible career changes for Dan, Captain Ty came by. We all decided that becoming a ferry boat captain would not be practical.
Dan's instructions were to relax. Instead, I was the one who immediately crashed on the sofa and did not wake up until Dan started to cook dinner.

Today we have to think of poor Dan. He got himself so stressed that he started having chest pain. They did some tests in the ER and decided there was no immediate emergency. Apparently they were not convinced he was well enough to go home just yet, but well enough that they could leave him in the hallway for six hours while they waited for a room to open up.

Cookies
Becky was terribly impatient about letting me photograph her cookies and milk. Well, just think a minute about poor Gwen. Not only is she stuck in a dorm with no fresh home-baked cookies, but before she can even end her IM chat with her mom, her dad calls her on the phone with a question about removing chewing gum from clothes.

When it Rains it Pours

When Becky asked me what that slogan meant, I realized I never did "get" it, so I ought to find out. I don't feel dumb for not knowing because there are some Harvard educated people who also don't know.
Morton salt adds a "flowing agent" (calcium silicate - aka slag) which keeps it from clumping up in humid conditions. Therefore, when it is raining outside, your salt will pour freely!

An Evening in Paris
Gwen and Doug.
This is the kind of event college students go to these days.

Meigs Farm scene for the Land Trust.
This scene was not part of the assignment, but was worth noting.

Working out in the yard, it is not that unusual to spot a rabbit hopping about or a bee flying through a window. However there was something quite remarkable about these.

Good Dog Carl
I'm sure there were many important authors and political big-wigs at the library fundraiser, but I was most impressed with meeting the actual subject of the Carl books.

To HKC: See, here's my point - it's all a matter of perspective. Now do her feet look big? No, but her hands do.

The Smile Guy, Jonah
I was the 51st person to take his picture this year. Last year 255 people took his picture.

Who do I run into the one time I am out of the office, in the big city, attending a seminar? Our esteemed leader! He was not there for the lecture presented by the Commercial Real Estate Women – he finds all those smart women intimidating, he explained. Instead he was locked in a conference room with a group of antagonistic lawyers in an arbitration regarding the . . . (undisclosed, top secret) case.

The new furniture. It seems gigantic compared to how I rememeber it in the store. Dan's armchair is already taken over by Becky and Mew-mew before he even sees it. It is nice to have our living room back and the crazy assortment of music that surges from Becky's laptop.

"Blah, blah, blah, global warming, blah, blah blah. Isn't that shocking? You ought to put THAT in your blog," SM says to me yesterday on our morning coffee excursion. He has never looked at my blog and obviously has no idea of the point of my blog. (I'm not sure of the actual point myself, but I know it is not serious matters of national interest.) So I am free to use HIM as today's post!

(Undated file photo)

Wow! Big Rob is Fifty! What is that like Rob? This is a picture of Rob (the one in the dark socks, looking cocky) and his family - I believe they were in Italy making a Hollywood movie - some such story. This was before Rob's career as a basketball player, which was before his career as an attorney, which was before his career as the husband of a writer.

Now I ask you, who was this bike made for???
Wouldn't Rob look SO cool riding up to the ferry on this cruiser?

Bingo at “the Resort”
I’m always sure to arrive in plenty of time to join the Sunday afternoon Bingo hour. I’m beginning to suspect something fishy. Vivian (in the pink) ALWAYS wins one or more of the games. She is also always in charge of collecting the pennies before every round in that special leather cup. (I have learned to stack my pennies in piles of three [one for each card] like everyone else does.) Not only that, she announced that everyone was allowed only ONE fresh-from-the-oven chocolate-chocolate-chip cookie apiece. Everyone else ate their cookie right away, while she kept her’s under a napkin (you may note) and smugly nibbled on it between rounds. One of the players at our table, who will remain nameless, hid Vivian’s cookie while she was off rattling the penny cup at another table. Vivian was not amused. But my question is how can her Bingo wins be explained? Does she have special cards that coordinate with specially weighted calling balls? Is there actually some strategy to this game that I assume is totally chance?
Readers may have expected a report on the Academy Awards, but we are watching Animal Planet.

"Cream of the Crop"
(More populary known as the ice cream place in the Pavilion.) Dana, at the cash register, and Deanna MAKE ALL the ice cream. AT Dana's house! Actually her 800sf guest house is the ice cream factory. I highly recommend the strawberry sorbet.

Big Bicycle Bash on Bainbridge
Jeff, looking cool as ever in his leather jacket, doing what he does best, schmoozing.

Hostesses, Els and Devin having fun.

Lots of food was on hand, attractively laid out in the workshop, which was quite clean, by the way.

Apparently these kids did the actual manual labor to build the store, like tearing down walls - a perfect job for teenagers.

A bike store is a great place to have a party because if you get tired of talking to people, you can look at bikes


Jeff worked on some sales, or maybe it was just flirting as he showed these customers various bike saddles. I heard him tell these women, "This one is really sexy." I know Marty didn't fall for it.