President Obama painted a rosy picture of the state of the union on Tuesday night in a flowery speech about how America is on the way back. Who is he kidding? In just a few minutes the Mud Bay Blog identified a number of serious issues with the union that NO ONE seems to be working on. Here are five:
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State of the Union Rebuttal
Posted in Economy, Government
Reciting the Alphabet Backwards
Last Sunday I watched the National Football Conference championship game at my neighbor’s house. He had also invited two friends over who live on Marine Drive, Jerry and Marilyn. Jerry is a great storyteller. Marilyn has a talent I didn’t know about.
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Posted in Friends & Family
A Handy-Looking Snow Plow
Do I need one of these?
The big thaw started this morning. Aided by a steady rain, warmer temperatures are slowly converting the snow on my steep driveway into a river of slush. I will probably be able to drive up it tomorrow, the third day after Wednesday’s storm. But if I had a wheeled snow shovel like the one shown in the photo, I would be out sooner.
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Posted in Home, Mud Bay & Rocky Point
Keep My Truck for as Long as You Want
Yesterday’s snow storm, which doubled down this morning with several hours of freezing rain, is a blessing for the region’s auto body shops. Snow and ice cause wrecks. Ironically, my 1999 Toyota Tacoma is at Bremerton’s Trew Auto Body this week for repair from a non-snow-related accident. I’m in no hurry to get it back. Trew can put some of the storm’s victims ahead of it as far as I’m concerned.
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Posted in Business Beat, Cars, Weather
Catch My Drift
Front door drift
It always snows more somewhere else. That’s especially true with the much-delayed storm that blew into Western Washington early this morning. South Puget Sound was hit harder than Kitsap County and Seattle, with Tacoma reporting 8 inches of snow and up to a foot accumulating in Olympia. Although only about 3 inches of the white stuff fell at my house, I may have one of the region’s better snow drifts (see photo).
The knife-edged drift was caused by a strong wind blowing from Dyes Inlet down the length of Mud Bay. When it hit the north end of my house, the wind split and was funneled between the side of the house and the steep hillside that borders the front parking area. At its highest point the drift is 30 inches tall. All that snow had to come from somewhere, and as the photo shows, the flat part of my driveway is almost clear. There’s plenty of snow left on the steep part though, so I’m snowed in at least until tomorrow.
Posted in Mud Bay & Rocky Point, Weather
The Dalby Waterwheel
Big wheel keep on turning
I have always wanted my own waterwheel. Since I have never owned any property with flowing water, the next best thing is to visit the Dalby Waterwheel (see photo) whenever a day trip takes me along Hood Canal’s South Shore Road. The old waterwheel, now an historic landmark, is located on State Route 106 near mile post 7 just east of the Alderbrook Resort. Water from Dalby Creek has been turning the old waterwheel for almost 90 years.
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2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.
Posted in Uncategorized
10 Books I Read in 2011
I lifted this entry’s title from the Home.Spice.Life blog. Her (or his) recent post about books read in 2011 was recognized in WordPress’s Freshly Pressed section, meaning it was judged to be among the best posts of the day. Congratulations! My list of books is different.
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Posted in Books & Movies
The Toll Road Bandito
Times have changed. With automated tolling beginning today on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, drivers now have to pay to cross Lake Washington on SR 520 unless they ignore the bill for the trip when it arrives in the mail (a bad long-term strategy) or make a late-night crossing. They can also go out of their way to cross the lake on the still untolled I-90 bridge or take an alternate route around it. None of these options would have been acceptable to a guy I knew years ago—the Toll Road Bandito.
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Posted in Economy
King Tide on Mud Bay
Cat patrol at high tide
Posting a King Tide photo is becoming an annual event for the Mud Bay blog. This is my third. The picture was taken at the north end of Mud Bay a few minutes before this morning’s official high tide (7:45 AM, 13.6 feet). I don’t have a GPS so I can’t be more specific on location. The small bulkhead provides a rough yardstick for measuring the water’s height. It’s rare to see water on its land side.
To avoid any hint of plagiarism, I revised my original photo caption, which quite accurately said “It was a dark and stormy morning.” That’s the Mud Cat in the photo. Normally he likes to patrol on the top of the bulkhead but not this morning. For the record it was a dark and stormy morning.
King Tides are higher-than-normal tides that occur once or twice a year in the winter when the moon is at its closest point to the earth and the gravitational pulls of the sun and moon are acting together.
Posted in Mud Bay & Rocky Point
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