“Let’s run just for fun,” we agreed, lying to one another, though neither of us knew it then. Two years ago, my sister took up my favorite sport: trail running. Since that time, she’s gone from whining about the distance a few miles from the finish, to winning her division in a small local race. Last week, when we learned that she’d …
Category Archives: Recreation
Do You Want to Build a Robot?
The buzzer sounded signaling the end of the match. Spectators cheered the outcome: the Anacortes Cyborg Ferret’s Blue Alliance outscored the top seeded Red Alliance in Carver Division semifinal 1 at the 2017 FIRST World Championship playoffs in Houston. Nearly one hundred teams of the 400 participating would compete in the semis. In 2017, the World Championship was split into two full competitions in two different cities. The …
Ticked Off While Searching for a Glacier-Scraped Rock
I gripped the insect’s head with sharp-tipped tweezers. Its tiny front legs held firmly, refusing to release even as my skin stretched with the pull. I dug in with its pointy parts as far as I could stand. Within a minute…success! I dropped the bug into a plastic sandwich bag, sealed it and began to worry. In nearly a dozen years of walking, hiking and running hundreds of miles along the …
Continue reading “Ticked Off While Searching for a Glacier-Scraped Rock”
Syzygy, Tides and Jonathan White
My arms ached as I pulled back and down on the boom, windsurfing towards an island on one of the last tacks I had the energy to make to avoid the embarrassment of a rescue. I zigzagged shoreward. The wind on my sail brought me closer, but the tide pulled me away. A fall would …
Get Grinch Quick With the Selfie Stick
Four camouflaged men carrying semi-automatic weapons materialized at the train station in Paris while we were breakfasting, welcoming us to the way the world had changed since my last visit three decades ago. While deciding go/no go to Europe, it was my teenage son who insisted that our fears about potential terror attacks were unwarranted and …
Readings Between the Spines: My Quest For the Best Crabbing Time
The crab I trapped overnight at Cornet Bay tap-scratched the inside of the blue bucket. That the foursome was a winter season record for me was great, but I dreaded what I needed to do next: kill ’em. The Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) site’s section on Cleaning and Preparing Crab suggests …
Continue reading “Readings Between the Spines: My Quest For the Best Crabbing Time”
If I Only Had a Brain
Scarecrow and Tin Man didn’t know how good they had it. According to the National Science Foundation, “With few exceptions, jellyfish are brainless, bloodless, boneless and heartless, and have only the most elementary nervous systems.” Every Whidbey and Fidalgo islander has likely encountered a rusty-maroon eight-lobed blob lying along the shore: Cyanea capillata or Lion’s Mane jellyfish. …
Chin Scraper, Trail Taker, Might I Need a Pacemaker?
Race day morning: raindrops barraging the skylights, wind whipping through the trees, and a forecast of 100% chance of rain from nine to noon, the duration of the Bellingham Trail Half Marathon. So, I did what any self-respecting person would do, went back to bed. As I lay there, I knew I wouldn’t be able …
Continue reading “Chin Scraper, Trail Taker, Might I Need a Pacemaker?”
Creeping Up With the Joneses
In the Contributor’s Notes about his story The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever, author Daniel H. Wilson explains his use of a black hole, “In my mind, the black hole represents the terrible actuality of holding on forever. It violently demonstrates what we all know to be true in our hearts: we must always be letting …
Race Report: Mt Erie Trail Run
Putting The Art of Racing in the Rain into practice wouldn’t have been necessary during this year’s Dallas Kloke Mt Erie Road and Trail Run. Meteorologists forecasted cloudy skies with no chance of precipitation. Had I known my new nemesis, younger and smaller than I, would embarrass me so much, I may have decided to just …
Site Title 