Retiring an Old Friend

Posted on March 10, 2011 | 1 comment

It used to be dark green.


After 9 years and an estimated 1800 bike rides my old Microsoft Visual C#.net sweatshirt (see photo) is going into retirement. A friend who still works at the company that makes Windows got me a replacement this week. The new sweatshirt has already provided my outermost protection on two rainy rides. That’s a good start on the process of achieving the proper weathered look biking apparel should exhibit.

Although today is trash day, I’m not going to toss out the old one. Too many memories for that. The old sweatshirt is exactly what the Beach Boys had in mind when they put this couplet in the lyrics to “Little Honda”:

Put on a ragged sweatshirt
I’ll take you anywhere you want me to

So I’m going to keep it and perhaps bring it out of retirement from time to time.

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Posted in Biking

A Gas Story

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 1 comment

We've seen this before


My local Shell station (see photo) has hiked the price for regular gas by 9 cents a gallon in the last two days. This latest round of price increases reminds me of a long-ago trip when I experienced a severe case of “pump shock.” The story goes back to the 1970’s, a decade of oil embargoes, gas rationing, and steadily increasing fuel prices. The media summed things up then by coining the term “gas crisis.”
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Posted in Business Beat, Economy, Friends & Family

Mud Bay Rainbow

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 2 comments

Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Indigo-Violet


Marine Drive and Rocky Point were briefly bridged about noon today by a gorgeous rainbow (see photo). The multicolored arc was encouraging—you don’t see one unless the sun is shining—but short-lived. As I write this the weather is back to showers followed by rain followed by showers. If there is a pot of gold where the rainbow’s west end touched down at the tip of Marine Drive, it looks like an easy dig at low tide. Does anyone have a clam rake?

2 Comments

Posted in Mud Bay & Rocky Point, Weather

A Community Effort

Posted on March 2, 2011 | 1 comment

A quick response


About 2:20 PM this afternoon high winds toppled a clump of fir trees in the 2500 block of Rocky Point Road blocking the road and knocking out power briefly for the second time today. By chance I was returning home from a bike ride just after the trees went down. With a couple of chainsaws, a big pickup truck, and the efforts of about a dozen of us, the road was open for traffic in about 15 minutes. When I returned later with my camera, the only evidence of the big crash (see photo) was a pile of branches and a man loading some free firewood. As one of the chainsaw operators, he was welcome to it.

Most of western Washington has been under a high wind advisory today with gusts of up to 60 mph forecast for the coast. Tonight the local TV stations will respond with coverage of big waves, downed trees, and other evidence of the storm. There won’t be any footage from Rocky Point though as we were too fast for any newshounds looking for wind damage. Our community effort even beat the fire department. The last few branches were being dragged off the road just as a red ladder truck from the Westgate station showed up. The number of cars backed up in both directions by the short delay surprised me. But the wait could have been a lot longer.

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Posted in Mud Bay & Rocky Point, Weather

A Thousand Icicles

Posted on February 26, 2011 | 2 comments

North Shore ice


The weather has been frigid the last few days with daytime highs in the thirties and lows in the teens at night. A few days ago most of Puget Sound was on an extended snow watch with some areas getting up to six inches of snow. Even so I was surprised to see an icicle tree on my bike ride today (see photo). The winter wonder is on Hood Canal’s North Shore Road about a half mile west of Belfair State Park.

The family who lives there usually decorates the trees along the road at Christmas time with lights and hanging snowflakes (a few are visible under the ice). For this late February display they seem to be going for the spiky frozen look. I don’t know if they sprayed the tree with a hose or perhaps a sprinkler head broke and supplied the water. Either way the icicles are real (brr) but probably not natural. The green layer under the frozen branches is a mixture of rhododendrons and sword ferns, leaves heavily encased in ice.

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Posted in Other Local Places, Weather

Tagged

Christian Suspense

Posted on February 21, 2011 | 1 comment

Until I read Deceit by Brandilyn Collins last week, I didn’t know there was such a thing as Christian suspense. But a quick search on the Internet turned up numerous web sites, a blog, and a category on Amazon.com devoted to promoting and selling quality fiction in this specialized literary genre. Christian suspense books appear to be popular.
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Posted in Books & Movies

The Mud Cat Is Starting to Feel Better

Posted on February 17, 2011 | 4 comments

The Mud Cat, my seven-year-old Bengal, aka Pi, has been battling a fever and loss of appetite caused by a liver infection. This morning, for the first time in a week, he ate a few bites of canned cat food and lapped up a tiny bit of milk. Also the vet measured his temperature at just below 102 degrees F, almost normal for a cat. Previously it was 104.
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4 Comments

Posted in Pi

Lucky Day

Posted on February 12, 2011 | 1 comment

At Kitsap Regional Library a little green shamrock sticker denotes a “lucky day” book—one that’s reshelved right away instead of going to the next person on the hold list. Today I got lucky at KRL’s main branch. After all, what’s the expected shelf life of the latest Robert Crais novel in the new-book section during a rainy Saturday afternoon in February?
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Posted in Books & Movies

Buoy Collection Envy

Posted on February 10, 2011 | 4 comments

Which collection do you prefer?


If you live near the water, I trust your answer to the question posed in the photo caption isn’t “none of the above.” Of course that assumes you, at some point, have seen and admired someone’s collection of weathered fishing buoys and possibly considered starting one. Sadly the group of floats and buoys I have salvaged from Puget Sound beaches, drab and lacking variety, is the one at the bottom. It’s a long way from matching the color and character of the upper collection, displayed on the shed of an unidentified Cape Cod beachcomber (and featured in Araks Sharing Beauty blog).

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Posted in Home

Displaying the Bird

Posted on February 8, 2011 | 1 comment

Treasure Island gull


One of my volunteer jobs is to maintain the web site for the Treasure Island Country Club, the homeowner’s association for the island where I own a vacation place. The web site looks dated and could use a professional redesign. It was created in 2002, back when 17-inch monitors were still a luxury, well before social media and Web 2.0. I use an older version of Microsoft FrontPage to keep it updated. Today I added a new feature so at least the URL looks cutting edge when you view it in the address bar or in a favorites list. Instead of the default Internet Explorer symbol, there’s now a custom icon displaying the official Treasure Island seagull.

Microsoft calls these icons “shortcut icons” and has been supporting them since I.E. 5.0. But their popularity has taken off in the last year or so. It’s surprisingly simple to add one. All you need to do is to save an icon to your web site’s root directory with the default file name favicon.ico. (The browser does the rest.) The icon needs to be square in size, at least 16 x 16 pixels, and in icon format. Since I don’t have an icon editor, I created a square bitmap in Microsoft Paint of the Treasure Island seagull on a dark blue background. I uploaded the bitmap to one of the free icon-generator web sites, followed the steps there, and saved it as a 32 x 32-pixel icon. That’s all there is to it.

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Posted in Uncategorized