North Cascades NP, Washington - November 10, 2006

Well, it's been an exciting last couple of weeks. First there were the dogs. I love dogs. I thought it would be a great idea to do some dogsitting. They could stay at my house for the week. We'd play games. I'd throw the tennis ball around. Much fun would be had by all. Then the little bastards ate my slippers. I hate dogs.

Actually, it wasn't too bad, once we got to know each other. Three yellow labs were a bit much for a house that size, but I spent a lot of time throwing the tennis ball across the living room for them while watching a movie, reading, etc. Which, unfortunately, means that there are now hundreds of tennis-ball marks to wash off the wall before I leave, but that should work out okay. When going through my move-out checklist with the housing manager, I learned that dogs aren't allowed in shared housing. Oops. It also sounds like they're pretty strict on cleaning requirements, so I'll probably spend a lot of time this weekend cleaning up. I'm hoping that my housemate (Zach) will help, but since he hasn't washed a single dish since he moved in three weeks ago, my hopes are not high. He spends most of his time at our neighbor's house, watching Stargate. In the last five weeks, he's gone through 8 seasons (at 22 episodes a season), and he only has one season left to watch before he leaves. He's been averaging about 4 to 5 episodes a day, including marathons on the weekends from 2 PM 'til around dawn, then sleeping until 12:30 in the afternoon and starting over. I tried watching one episode. Obviously I'm missing something.

Yesterday Cheryl L. taught me how to drive manual transmission. I need to practice, obviously, but at least now I understand the theory of it. ("Clutch. Clutch. Remember to push down on the clutch.")

We've had massive amounts of rain in the last week. All the experts were predicting that this flood could top the record set in 1917. The highway was blocked on both sides of Marblemount and there were all kinds of new streams and waterfalls that weren't around a month ago, but it apparently wasn't that bad, as floods go. To make it extra interesting, though, we had a volunteer for the week, who arrived Sunday night, just when they were predicting the worst. He's an Oxford-born, New York inhabitant working 16 hour days as a software design manager for JP Morgan, and he had about a month of use-or-lose vacation time, so he decided to come to the North Cascades and do hard physical labor for the week, to relax. He had a great time, it seems, and is planning on trying to drag some of his coworkers with him next year, as a team-building exercise.

We all had a big banquet at my boss' house. I foolishly agreed to make a homemade pumpkin pie for the party, which wouldn't have been a problem, except that I didn't have a food processer, and I had to walk two miles to my boss' house, in the rain, at night, to use hers, and I had trouble finding the turn-off in the dark. It wasn't even that great of a pumpkin pie, either - I like the Costco ones better. The pumpkin chocolate chip muffins I made the next day from the leftover pumpkin puree turned out a bit better.

Some photos of the North Cascades by one of my coworkers: http://www.pdbphoto.com/home/index.php

I went square dancing last night.

It was fun. I've only got a couple more work days left, to finish up all the projects I've been working on, and then I'm off to dryer waters (in a matter of speaking), in southern Arizona. That should be different, at any rate. I'll send an e-mail when I get there of my new contact info, etc.

Cheers,
Nathan