Saturday afternoon in Middle Earth

One of those magical Northwest days where it might get cold and rain at any given moment -- but until then, the sky is filled with orange-blue-pink-and-gray light and strange things happen to the afternoon shadows and colors. Here we're waiting for Thompson to run his legs out at Minto-Brown park.

Speaking of which, I just learned that Google Earth is now available for the Mac platform! Very cool. If you've never seen it, it's something that you need to have. Download it free from Google for your computer, then type in your address and watch it zoom to your house using real photos from outer space.

Here, we have Nigel running as fast as his legs will carry him back to the car. There's a certain exhiliration, I'm convinced, that comes from running at top speed through a park filled with dogs, hoping you're not knocked to the ground by an over-exuberant Retreiver, Boxer, Setter, or, dare-I-say, Whip-a-dor?

Punky muggle

As you can see from this photo, Nini's feeling under the weather this weekend. She's lost her voice and had a tiny fever on Saturday, so we spent the day just hanging out as a family. She napped and watched some old Electric Company episodes in her room.

Actually, this is her sitting at the table while I read several chapters of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone Saturday morning. We've really been getting into it. Elissa's read this first one, but none of the rest of us had read any of the uber-saga. I sort of thought it would be too mainstream to follow the crowd and enjoy it with everyone else over the last 10 years of Harry Potter-mania. Reading it now, I'm just as amazed and hooked into the story as your average human. I have to admit, there's a little bit of selfish glee in relishing the delayed enchantment after everyone else has long gotten over it -- sort of like saving all your Halloween Candy until after Thanksgiving, and eating it in front of all the other kids.

Anyway....we hope her eyes soon return to normal, or we're going to have to enroll the lass in the house of Slytherin.....which, as you know....was also the house of Vol...sorry...I mean the One-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.....

Drumming Duck

Somehow, in the last few weeks, Nigel has found his mojo and come out of his shell in many ways. One of these is his sudden affinity for playing the drums. We've had this set in the house for nearly a year now, and he's always complained when anyone played them. We always keep a couple sets of air-traffic-controller headphones nearby for that reason.

However, Elissa called me the other day while I was in Alaska to let me hear this: he's taken to drumming all of a sudden, getting the kick-and-hi-hats going with both legs working in opposite rhythm, and playing this clackety polyrhythm with the sticks on top. It's a pretty cool, sort of loose Meters-style funky beat.

I don't know where he gets this. I certainly can't play the drums to save my life. We think the independent limb coordination might come from his apparent left-handedness, which I've heard creates a more ambidextrous person than those of us who are so totally right-handed that the other hand really does little more than providing balance and aesthetic symmetry (like myself).

Snow day

Bundled up the brood and packed into the Element this weekend for a trip up to the snow. It's been snowing late at night in our neighborhood: fat, fluffy flakes falling fast....but they've melted pretty quickly and left no traces by morning, despite my hopeful alliterations.

So we got the sleds and snowboots, and drove about 90 minutes up into the Santiam Canyon east of Salem, past Detroit Lake and southeast toward HooDoo. This is from near the SkiBowl Sno-Park along that way. We pulled off and trudged up the trailhead about 25 feet from the parking lot, where we spent the afternoon sledding, hucking snowballs and lying in the powder.

It's amazing how quiet and pristine the woods were. The snow was easily 5 feet deep off the trail, and I sank in several times up to my waist and had to dig out. The kids both wore themselves out and ended up just sitting about 10 feet apart in the drifts, eating snow off their mittens and soaking up the moment. It was getting cold out, but they didn't want the day to end. - Isaac