Trucks

 
Yesterday, the whole fam damily went to an open house event at the nearby PACCAR facility.  PACCAR is a large multi-national corporation that had its origins in Seattle in 1905 producing railroad and logging equipment.  It now designs and manufactures trucks, trucks and more trucks - Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF. 

The local plant is one of their facilities used for research and development and it is where the trucks are extensively tested.  We saw trucks in a freezer, trucks being shaken and truck parts being studied in an electron microscope.  They have a 3D printer out there.  It looked like a pretty interesting place to work, even for the non-engineers among us. 

 Photography was not allowed in most areas.  But some of the display trucks were willing to pose for a few shots.

Dave's Picture

The tulip fields, a year ago...

Tulips

The Skagit Valley is famous for tulip and daffodil bulb cultivation and up to a million visitors come every year to see acres and acres of colorful, blooming flowers.

The daffodils are peaking now and the tulips are not far behind.

 Crop rotation is necessary for disease management so each field will be used for tulips just once every five years. Agricultural workers walk through the rows during the early blooming stage to cull out the rogues, varieties of flowers that are different than the ones planted.

Shortly after full bloom, the plants are "topped" to prevent the spread of disease and to force the plant to store energy in the bulb.  Forty five days later, the bulbs are harvested and prepared for sale.  Gardeners around the world will plant them in the fall and enjoy Skagit Valley tulips in their gardens next spring.

Topknot Hat

This is how one hat becomes five.  Make a generic hat from the top down, holding two strands of sock yarn together.  Notice that there seems to be a fair amount of sock yarn leftovers in the drawer.  Weigh hat and other available materials and knit away. 

These hats only take a few hours to make and will fit a toddler sized head. 

Johnny Cash

When I was just a baby

My mama told me son

Always be a good boy

Don't ever play with guns.

But my family went to Reno

Just to have some fun

And my crazy Uncle Jaime

Gave me my first gun.

Elmira

We hear that our house was originally a chicken coop. An old guy, Elvin Brevik, lived on a big piece of land, which he gradually split up and sold in parcels to our neighbors, many of whom have been here for 25 years or more. They remember when there were no trees in our front yard, when there was no "Seaview", a swanky subdivision down the hill, and when our house was home to chickens. Andrew and Becky bought our place from Elvin and transformed it into what it is today. Becky had three boys, one after the other, and Andrew built cabinets professionally and expanded the house and shop.

The realtor praised the custom cabinets in the kitchen and pointed to the stove. "It is completely modern but it looks old fashioned. It cost $6000."

What? Meet Elmira.

A home renovation blog could turn this story into a series of posts with blah before and twinkly after shots. Let's just say that Dave removed sweet Elmira, hacked into the cabinets and installed a stove and ventilation system that he preferred.

Demolition

After

And the postscript for our old girl, Elmira?  Craigslist found her a home in Wisconsin and she is now installed in a Log-Crete cabin. Yes, those logs are made of concrete. The stove's new owner told me, "Everything worked out great."

Photos courtesy of Log-Crete.com

Snowbirds

The Skagit Valley is winter habitat to thousands of snow geese and trumpeter swans. They arrive in the fall and feed in the wetlands and agricultural fields until early spring. Large flocks can be seen from the highway and, on side roads, it is not difficult to get close to the birds.

The numbers are truly spectacular.  During the summer, at the cabin in Alaska, we would see pairs of trumpeter swans, sometimes a dozen or so, and it seemed rare and precious and wild.  They'd fly by, honking, with a backdrop of craggy mountains and glaciers or float on the lake, coupled up, shy and evasive, and one would feel lucky to get a close look. I didn't know that, come winter, thousands of drivers on Interstate 5 would be looking at the very same birds.