Redeemed

With the assistance of a diver and some cash to pay him, the ring has been retrieved.

Perhaps more traditional than I thought

I just finished her applications for high school. I hate, hate, hate that we live in a district where you have to compete to get into a public high school. It isn't even a merit competition; it is a super-secret "decision process" carried out by school administrators in a building that looks condemned. I'm pretty sure it also involves the blood of virgins.
What has been entertaining, though, is engaging her in a (not) very serious conversation about her college goals. She's thinking Stanford, UNC, UW, although she has recently become enamored with a friend of our family who did her undergrad at Dartmouth and her masters at Harvard School of Ed. I told her to keep studying, because our friend's parents footed the bill for most of that and we won't be able to.
This has given me a chance to revist those heady days when I was writing to colleges to request info (writing! those were the days), dreamy about Bryn Mawr until the tuition statement came and Stanford until I didn't get in. I'm torn between hoping she goes far, far away for school and hoping she stays right here at home. Mostly, I just hope she doesn't end up in Pullman.

Not traditional

We all knew it had to happen sooner or later, what with being married to a sailor. Rtg's wedding ring sleeps with the fishes.

Whoops...The time just got away from me

My short list of wonderful things just got away from me. Justin, I'm working on the boat photo, but it may take a couple of weeks. They are busy doing "non-civilian" work (or maybe it's just that old sailor's rule about no girls on the boat).

Here's one of the wonderful things: it snowed here too! Just enough to make everything pretty, but not enough to mess up the bus schedule.



And another wonderful thing: Friday it was nearly 60 and sunny and clear. Take a look at those mountains! (For the geographically puzzled, that is the Olympic range--timely, no?--to the west of Seattle, across the sound, not to be confused with Mt. Rainier and the Cascades to the east as in this picture).



And one more from Friday, just because I like the juxtaposition of the old building salvage, the nice view, and the obvious construction:

A short listing of wonderful things

So, it has been raining for something like 45 straight days (wait, we had one day that was only cloudy, not wet, about a week ago...) and our basement has started to leak. In all the time we've lived here, we have never had water in the basement, which is why we had carpet installed a couple of years ago. Well, Rtg spent most of the evening de-installing the carpet and finding a place off the floor to lay it out to dry. Needless to say, we're all a little short-tempered and after my maternal meltdown this weekend, I have been composing a short listing of wonderful things, lest you should all start to think that our household is at its collective throat:
Here's one to start:
Today I had an outing that satisfied my yen for community planning, design and craft, and fried potatoes all in one sitting. Rtg has been working at the shipyard for the last month, directing the repair of his company's historic, wooden-hulled ferry boat. He's been telling me for years that I needed to come see the boat when it didn't have passengers to look at its beautiful, turn-of-the-century internal structure. So today, with the boat partially layed open, I went over to have some lunch and take a look.
The shipyard is in a portion of the Ship Canal called Fisherman's Terminal. It is still a place for working boats. It can be a bit rough and I had to step over part of a dead salmon that some bird had swiped from one of the boats and left on the dock, but it is the site of a great deal of hard work and community history, a community that has managed to resist that siren song of upscale condos and high-end waterfront restaurants to remain an area populated by smells and radio music and boats needing work. I am always struck by the complexity and beauty of the rigging systems used to haul nets and pots up out of the water. Design that allows one to see how a tool is perfectly matched to its job is elegance to me and these boats, with their block and tackle systems uncovered and unadorned are beautiful.
Before we went for lunch, Rtg hauled up the floor boards in the engine room so we could see the ribs of the boat. There are timbers in there that are nearly two feet across and fit together with astonishing precision. The fact that the whole thing is watertight, used to transport cars, and was mostly constructed without the aid of electricity is amazing. Again, elegance. I'm a pretty lucky kid to have access to all this.
Plus, now I can say the captain invited me below deck to show me some wood.
And I got french fries for lunch.