Ducks

My sister-in-law lives by this really cool wetland-pond area. When I was over there the other day to let her dogs outside, I saw this little gaggle of baby ducks and had to take a picture to show my blog readers. They kept going over in the long grass and the shadows, but I did manage to get this one picture of them. Baby ducks are so cute.



If you want to see some much better pictures than these, check out my friend Diane's blog. She had a bunch of baby wood ducks hatch on Memorial Day and was lucky enough to catch them coming out of their nest. She's a much better photographer than me, and I think she actually processes her pictures rather than just throwing them up as they come out of the camera like I do. I really need to get a better computer so it doesn't take me an hour to crop and fix one picture.

He's Popeye the Fish!

Because I'm sure you are all wondering what it looks like, here is a picture of Percy with his "popeye." It's kind of hard to tell from this picture how big it really is, but see all that red around it? That's part of the problem. This picture is from Friday when I first noticed the whole thing.



He does look better today. Now if he'll start swimming around and flaring again, I'll know he's better.

Do You Voodoo?

We've been watching a lot of Discovery, Travel & History Channels lately. Greg is addicted to those food shows on the Travel Channel like Bizarre Foods. A while back he saw a bit on Voodoo Doughnuts. Since they are right in our back yard, so to speak, we went over there yesterday to check it out. It's a quirky, eclectic building with interesting stuff inside. Very "keep Portland weird", if you know what I mean.

Here's the outside of the store.


The outside from the front.

The delivery truck.


A cool bush that looks like a voodoo doll.


Voodoo Doughnuts are known for their quirky and weird types of donuts (see their menu). I tried the maple bar with bacon strips. It was quite yummy, actually, but then I love maple bacon and dipping my bacon in maple syrup. We also tried the Memphis Mafia, which is a banana fritter with peanut butter and chocolate frosting and chocolate chips. I did not know until yesterday that peanut butter on a doughnut is actually very good. We also tried the Voodoo doughnut, which is a doughnut shaped like a voodoo doll with raspberry filling to simulate blood. It comes with a pretzel stick to use as your "pin."

For the novelty factor it was fun to try their wares, but at $15 a dozen I think I'll stick to Donut Nook here in Vancouver. They may not be as fancy or have been featured on a food show, but they are cheaper and closer!

Percy Progress

Well, it's been 5 days since I started Percy on his meds. He spends a lot of time hanging around the bottom of his tank, but his eye seems to be a little smaller. I hope he is doing okay. The directions on his medicine say to give it to him for 7 days and then do a water change. We'll see how things are going in a couple more days for him. I can't figure out if it's good for him to swim around in progressively more medicine in his water or not.

Greg just came in and told me Zinger was down on the table watching Percy and seemed fascinated by him. Have I mentioned that Zinger isn't the brightest of cats? Percy has been on the table where the cat food is since I came home on Friday and Zinger just now realized it.

I'd love to hear about Leah's new fishy, but she refuses to have a blog, so I guess I'll have to wait for a text about it. :-)

Sick Fish

Percy the fish is sick. He’s been acting very sluggish and depressed for the last couple of weeks, but not really exhibiting any specific symptoms. The water in his tank was clear but really stinky and I thought I fixed the problem when I changed it. Well, today I saw him and one of his eyes was HUGE. Turns out he has popeye. It’s an abscess that fish get behind their eye that causes it to swell. It can be treated with antibiotics and the fish usually recover.

As soon as I noticed his eye to day, I went o the pet store and got some Bettafix and then cleaned his tank, gave him fresh rocks and added the medicine. He’s just hanging out in his tank at the bottom right now not really doing anything. I’ll take him home with me this weekend and keep giving him more medicine and hopefully he’ll perk up.

It’s silly how attached I get to a five dollar fish.

Long Weekend Ahead

Yay! I have a nice long weekend ahead of me. I'm off Saturday-Wednesday! Wheee! I can't wait.

I have a zillion things to do around the house, but I think I'm only going to try to do a few of them.

What do you have planned?

Titanic

When we went to the Tulip Festival there was a guy in a booth there that had information about the first ever Titanic: Treasures from the Deep Mobile Museum. I was totally intrigued by this. I couldn't figure out what a mobile museum was and how they could have artifacts from the Titanic there. The coupon I got said it was free, so I asked my parents if they wanted to come along. Of course they did and so we met up at Washington Square on Saturday afternoon to go through the museum. It turned out the mobile museum was two big trailers together that created a big room that you could walk through and look at the artifacts. My trip to the Tulip Festival was totally worth it since I got a VIP coupon that kept us from waiting in line with the plebeian masses for over two hours. We only had to wait for about 15 minutes. They took our picture in front of the main staircase before we went in and gave us each a card that represented a passenger that was on the Titanic. I was 15-year-old Mrs. Selini Yazbeck from Hardin, Lebanon who was traveling to America with her husband of 50 days to Pennsylvania, where Antoni was a successful shoe merchant.

The exhibit was quite nice. Lots of signs and information and about 50-75 different artifacts that had been recovered from the wreck. I was amazed at the paper items that were on display. How could a wrapper from razor blades or soap have survived mostly intact after all this time? Amazing.

I find the Titanic stuff fascinating.



So I did a little research on Mrs. Yazbeck when I got home and this information from a letter she wrote

Selini/Celiney Yazbeck, Third Class Passenger
Letter from Mrs.Decker dated June 15 1955:
"I was a bride of 50 days. My husband and I were on our way to America to make our home. He had been to America before where he had a business.When I first realized that something was wrong, it was 11 o'clock [sic] at night and I was fast asleep. Suddenly, I heard a tremendous noise and immediately knew the ship had been hit hard. It almost threw me off the bed. The motor stopped at once. My husband and I jumped up and ran to see what had happened. We went to the engine room and saw the crew trying to repair parts of the ship. We were still wearing our night clothes. We rushed back to our room to put on our life preservers then went up on deck. Later we returned to our rooms to try to get our clothes, money and jewelry, but we found our room to be flooded with water. We went back on deck and we all started praying. We thought we could never be saved. All the lifeboats were being lowered. There were only 14 lifeboats. My husband and I headed for the lifeboats. He push me on and as he tried to join me, two policeman [sic!] grab him as they wanted to save all the women and children first. I began yelling and crying as I wanted to join him on the sinking ship. The boat was paddled away from the Titanic so fast that I couldn't jump off and be with my husband. We were about five minutes away from the ship, but we could still see it as the lights stayed on until the Titanic sank. The people on the Titanic were yelling and crying as it was slowly sinking. When the ship sank it made a tremendous noise that I will never forget. The impact of the sinking was so great, it shook the waters and we thought our lifeboat would sink too, everyone screamed. After the sinking, which was right at midnight [sic], we were without any lights. As our boat was being paddled in the dark, everyone prayed.I had fainted and I was very depressed (There were 14 people aboard our lifeboat). The next morning we saw a big ship. We were all taken aboard one by one with a rope + a board. On the ship, I met mysister who was also on the Titanic + had been put on one of the other lifeboats. We were given hot tea, blankets and clothes. After four days we arrived in New York. I was ill and was taken to the hospital where I stayed for a week. After a week, I was reunited with my father. My name was Celiney Yasbeck."

Squeeeee!

I got the best gift ever this weekend. As you may know from my incessant whining on this blog and/or in person, I have been swamped the last month or so with work things regarding the annual budget. This is the busiest time in the world for me since I support the folks entrusted with this gargantuan undertaking. During the month or so the major budget prep and hearings are going on, I tend to work 12-16 hour days and not much gets done at home on weeknights since I just go home and fall into bed. Since I’m not doing home chores much on weeknights that means a ton of chores are waiting for me on the weekend. Not only chores await me, but those nasty home projects like the floor that we’ve been working on forever. Sometimes it feels like I never get a break. I try to be adult about it and suck it up, but I usually want to go and play on my days off. So when the date for the Spring Flinger 4: How the West Was Flung letterboxing gathering was set at May 3rd, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to go.

I was sad. All my favorite people were going to be there and I was going to miss out…again. All my letterboxing girlfriends were going up on Saturday to help plant boxes and party and stay at a hotel and giggle until the wee hours and I was going to miss it. Sigh. But I had completely reconciled myself to this fact and only sniveled about it a little, fully prepared to be an adult and work around the house on all the things waiting there for me. Boy was I in for a surprise.

I lolled around in bed on Sunday morning reading my book (the new Kim Harrison “White Witch, Black Curse” which was awesome) when Greg came in and asked me what we were doing for the day. I offered up the options of dishes, laundry, cleaning, working on the floors, mowing the lawn, weeding. To my absolute shock and delight, Greg said he’d go with me to SF4 for the day if I wanted to go. WHAT??? Who are you and what did you do with Mr. Grumpy Pants??????

Before he could change his mind I showered, dressed, grabbed my bag and the Wonder Whippets and we headed out the door. The gathering was at Lewis & Clark State Park in Winlock, Washington which is about an hour away (exit 68 on I-5 to be precise). I’d never been there before, and it was a really nice park with lots of hiking trails and great letterbox hiding places. Crappy trail maps, though. It’s a campground too, but I sure didn’t see many muggles around, just letterboxers. We got lucky with the weather, too, and it was mostly sunny until we were about ½ way home.

So we got up there about noon and surprised the heck out of everyone. Greg hadn’t met many of my letterboxing buddies, so he got introduced around a lot and Carmen & Sophie were oohed and ahhed over. I stamped in to the event stamp, did some exchanges and chatted with folks in the shelter for a bit then went out and ended up boxing with X Marks the Spot and Bobguyman which was really fun. I wish they weren’t going to be moving so far away. Stupid Coast Guard. Then we did some boxing with Maiden and the Gischer Gryffindors (who will probably hate me forever for my accidentally snotty "well it's right here" comment on a box they had trouble finding and I walked right to) Crazy Dave, and James Bond who were two young friends of Marmalade’s, which was great, although I don’t think I managed to exchange with the Gryffindors now that I think about it.

We let the Wonder Whippets (who forgot their letterboxing stamps) off leash while we were out on the trail and they had the best time racing around, eating mud, chewing on sticks, and at one point, snacking on other species feces. You could just see the big smiles on their faces as they raced each other around the trails. I loved seeing them so happy. I really need to train them to hunt Tupperware, though.

Greg was a good sport all day. He not only didn’t complain about being there or holding the dogs, or carrying the dog poop for 3 hours, he seemed like he might actually have had a good time. While I did introduce him as Mr. Grumpy Pants to people, he really deserved to go back to his original trail name of Seahunter (he forgot his letterboxing stamp too. I just don't carry it around with me anymore like I used to. Guess I'll have to start again.).

We found about 20 boxes, did a couple of exchanges, and left about 4:00. InI really wanted to find the rest of the boxes that were planted there for the event before we left, but I wasn’t going to push my luck. We did stop at Jackson’s Cabin for one box that has been there for ages (You may remember that "find 10 boxes that were planted before I started letterboxing" is an item on my 101 in 1001 list) and I picked up a hitchhiker which was fun. I haven’t gotten a HH in ages.

It was such a fun day and I had the BEST time. Greg even took a few pictures for me.