After the storm passed, we were invaded by birds. The number of seagulls, crows, grebes, herons and surf scoters doubled or quadrupled for a couple of hours. It was weird. The major difference was that after a California storm the sun comes out - here we have yet to see the sun again. Here the wind drops to zero and the water is dead flat.
I had forgotten that one of the inconveniences of rural life is the periodic lose of electrical power. We lost power twice this last week. Once before the storm and once late in the storm. We hadn?t made any preparations for this eventuality and on the first outage we sat in the dark for a couple of hours. The second outage was while we were sleeping.
With all the summer boats gone, Port Susan (the bay we live on is Port Susan) has gotten very quiet. This quiet has been disturbed the last couple of days by the State Department of Fish and Game. They sent out a boat with fairly sophisticated sonar and a diver to recover lost crab pots. Crab pots are lost when either the buoy marking the pot or the rope tied to the pot is lost. The pot sits on the bottom is still does its job. When the bait runs out, the crabs in the trap die of starvation. When they die, they act as bait for new crabs. This cycle continues for as long as the crab pot retains its mechanical integrity.
The traps are relatively expensive - $75 to $200 each, but they do get lost. You put out your trap and leave it for some period of time ? sometimes overnight. If the trap is missing when you go back, you have no idea what might have happened. Watching the diver was interesting. We?ve seen him dive on several sites, but we've not seen him recover anything. Either they're were diving on a false signal or maybe they are breaking up the trap under water and leaving it there.
When we first moved in, we met with the homeowner. When I asked him about trimming up the yard, he said that the only restriction was he didn?t want the madrone tree cut - in fact, if the madrone survived he was planning to cut the blue spruce to make room for the madrone.
Randy's good buddy Jerry Minear has a degree in Forestry. Jerry suggested that madrones cannot be transplanted and aren't easy to grow from seed. Basically, madrones grow where they want to or not at all. I did trim the spruce tree so as to accommodate the madrone. Which tree survives will be up to the homeowner.
We have been trying to figure out a good time to return to Desert Aire to finish up the store's computer to do backups onto a CD. You might not believe that our social calendar for October is pretty full. Anyway, late Saturday night we decided that if we went Sunday, we wouldn't have to be home until Tuesday afternoon. Nancy is teaching a class on Tuesday night. So, early Sunday we went east. We got to the Desert about 2:30PM and everything went perfectly and we were done by 4:30. After all the foul ups and missing parts, the system worked great.
Monday morning, it took only about an hour to train Ricki and my Step-sister, Diana, in the new procedure and we were home (Camano) by early afternoon.