Blog Archive: [2009.2] | [2009.1] | [2008.3] | [2008.2] | [2008.1] | [2007.3] | [2007.2] | [2007.1] | [2006.3] | [2006.2] | [2006.1] | [2005.3] | [2005.2] | [2005.1] | [2004]

I had a busy holiday season. First, my Grandma and Aunt Jan came to town, along with my brother Jack, his girlpartner Jain and step-daughter Moira from Missoula, MT. A key accomplishment of this week was when I took one day off work and Aunt Jan and I brewed a pilsner together. Then there was the usual Christmas festivities. One notable item that Santa procured for me was a Droid phone, an iphone copycat offered by Verizon Wireless. The Droid runs Android, a Linux-based operating system developed by Google. An advantage of this open-source model is that it is easy for third-party software developers to develop applications for Android devices, and make them available for all, consequently there is already a wealth of cool apps available, many free. My favorite app so far is the "Seattle Bus Bot" which uses the GPS locator to show the next bus arrivals at bus stops near the current location. I have been using my Droid to write this blog entry during pockets of free time over the past week. Anyway, back to the stated topic...

After Christmas, my Dad, Beth, Shawn, Jack, Jain, Moira, Amie and myself all went to a very posh rented cabin near Lake Wenatchee. It was almost like staying in old cabin of pioneer days, but with a 4-car heated garage. We all went snowshoeing up the Chiwakum trail on the first day, and saw some really cool icicles and frozen waterfalls. On the second day, Shawn, Beth and I snowshoed up the east part of Nason Ridge; it was a steeper trail, but we were treated to fabulous views of Lake Wenatchee and Dirtyface Peak.

Later that day, Amie utilized the new Amtrak station in Leavenworth and caught a train to her hinterlands in Sandpoint, ID. While she wined and dined and cross-country skiied with her family, I stayed in town and worked a few days in a deserted office. I accomplished a monumental cleaning and organization of my inbox, and brushed up on the changes to the new 2009 Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

Over New Years weekend, we went with some friends to the town of Pacific Beach to dig razor clams! The Department of Fish & Wildlife permits only a selected number of open razor clam digs per year; the clams are so plentiful this season that they were able to open up a 3 or 4 day dig (depending on the specific beach) over New Years. The digs are only open during the evening low tide, so an added challenge is that the digs must be done in the dark! On our first night we didn't have much luck, the surf was choppy and we arrived a bit late after low tide, it was windy and our lanterns had trouble staying fully lit. Even the locals were lamenting about the poor "show" that night. Consequently, we collectively collected a grand total of 5 clams, barely enough to make a chowder. The second night was a different story, it was a calm night and we arrived about 45 minutes ahead of low tide; within about an hour 5 of us had collected our maximum quota of 15 clams each (for a total of 75). We feasted upon bbq'd salmon and fried clams that evening. On the third night, it was just Amie and I at the cabin, we wanted to go for a third night of clamming, but it was a bit of a bust, literally. After collecting 7.5 clams, a relatively-friendly tribal police officer approached us and informed us that this night was reserved for tribal members only; we had to leave (although we were allowed to keep what we had already dug). We must have misread the clam bulletin. All was not lost, Amie made an amazing desert back at the cabin. This was my second clamming trip, it was fun but I felt a little sorry for the cute little clams. More importantly, it was interesting to learn about and appreciate an important traditional food source of the Pacific Northwest.

Anyway, it's back to the grind this week. This year I begin to work for a new workgroup at King County Metro. The Speed & Reliability group has been disbanded, and I now work for Transit Systems & Traffic Engineering; the name and organizational structure is different, but I'm basically still doing the same things.

Henry has gone to live with a foxy white silkie hen
where he is expected to provide stud service and
become a pampered pet.

As noted previously, we had obtained three silkie chicks early in the summer. Much to our dismay, all three turned out to be roosters. The white one was called Kuan Yin and we thought maybe was a hen after the other two had started crowing. Then Kuan Yin started crowing and we renamed him Henry. We tolerated Henry for a while and he was quite entertaining, but we sensed that the neighbors were not as amused, and he started becoming aggressive towards Jenna. We didn't have the heart to do away with him as we did the others, and besides he was a scrawny bag of fluff, skin and bones, so we put out an ad in craigslist. We found a taker in Carnation, and Amie went to Renton to make the handoff. As the txt message indicates, Henry is one lucky rooster.

In the meantime, we obtained two new lovely hens, Buffy and Lucy. They are prolific egg layers and we have been getting about 2-3 eggs per day.

A few weeks ago, Amie and I traveled down to Breitenbush Hot Springs for the Puget Sound Mycological Society's annual mushroom conference! Breitenbush itself was a real treat, it's a quaint hot springs resort in the middle of the Oregon Cascades, complete with soaking pools, geothermally heated cabins, a main lodge where 3 vegetarian meals are served every day, and the whole place is powered (usually) by an on-site hydroelectric facility.

The mushroom conference went for four days and was pretty interesting. The format consisted of field trips in the morning after breakfast, cooking and identification workshops in the afternoon, and then a couple of presentations each evening after dinner. The field trips are were I learned the most; we got to tromp around the woods with real experts who were just as excited to be finding unusual and/or edible mushrooms as we were, and quite happy to be sharing their knowledge to amateur forgers like ourselves. Among the edibles, we found specimens of Chanterelles, (Cantharellus cascadensis) including a monster Chanterelle that Amie found that weighted almost a pound, Matsutakes (Tricholoma magnivelare), a delicacy in Japan that can fetch top dollar, Lobster Mushrooms (Hypomyces Lacifluorum) a parasitic mushroom that grows on and engulfs other mushrooms, and Garlic Marasmius (Marasmius Scorodonius), small mushrooms that smell and taste like garlic and mainly grows on fallen Oregon Grape twigs. After our tromping, we would take all of our specimens back to the Breitenbush lodge and set them all on a large table for identification and sorting; mushrooms of same species would be grouped together. With several different groups going out each day, we had amassed quite a collection by the end of the weekend; at least 30 different species collected within just a few miles of Breitenbush.

I learned quite a bit over the weekend, especially being able to distinguish between some of the different fungal families. I learned about a few other edible species that I had seen before in the woods while hiking, and now I know that I can cook these into tasty treats next time I find them.

On the last day, I went on a day hike up to nearby Devil's Ridge while Amie did some foraging on her own. While I was enjoying the views, Amie found more Chanterelles than she could possibly carry in her basket. We took these home, preserved them in the freezer, and have been enjoying them in many meals since, including tonight's stir fry!

I just posted some pictures of some of my more recent adventures into the mountains. Since I converted my desktop machine to Ubuntu Linux, I had been lacking a good HTML gallery generator for a while, causing me to put off posting my new pictures online for almost a year. After a little searching, I discovered and installed the digiKam software package, which has the HTML gallery feature plus a lot of other useful tools. I find digiKam to be much more useful than the F-Spot Photo Manager, the default image management program that comes with Ubuntu Desktop Edition. Anyway, check out:

• Goat Rocks Wilderness (August 2009)
• Carbon River, Carbon Free (July 2009)
• Tour de Mountain Loop (May 2009)
• Mount Stuart Loop (July 2008)

© 2009 Owen Kehoe

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