I always thought that we could empathize with our exchange kids when they hit that "go-home" time. Knowing that it's going to be an emotionally charged time and having seen the kids go through it, doesn't make it any easier.
Our renters (the people renting our house) haven"t left yet. The man living in our house has had a heart transplant at Stanford and is undergoing an experimental treatment to stop the organ rejection. I understand that his treatment involves the irradiation of his bone marrow and reseeding with stem cells. This is all very interesting and exciting, but we want our house back.
I told our rental agent that we could probably live with the renters being a little late. I should have cleared that with Nancy. I thought we could just stay on Camano for a little extra time, but Nancy won't hear of it. Nancy's idea is that the renters could stay in our house for extra time but we would need to find something down there to stay in - maybe one of those extended stay motels. Nancy has lots of commitments, but I think the bottom line is that she is a little homesick. In all fairness to her, she is scheduled to work at the yarn shop, teach some classes and start her prep for the upcoming holiday season.
The biggest problem right now is we don't know how much extra time the renters need to stay. The man has a last treatment or therapy session at the end of the month. They are going to try and find out from the doctors before then. We have pestered our rental agent, but all he can do is wait on the doctors. So, we'll wait.
The weather returned to the typical rainy and gray on the first of October. Since then we have had a continuous stream of gray with a few notable exceptions. The couple of nice days have been glorious. When the sun comes out and the fall colors show in their full spectrum, it is definitely worth the price of admission. After a couple of weeks with very lackluster tides, during which we had nothing move on the beach, we have gotten a string of extremely high tides. With the high tide the flotsam has started to move and the bay is a mess. We?re back to patrolling the beach and pushing off any monster logs and junk to keep our beach clean. I'm sure it's a game that can't be won, but like solitaire, we play it anyway.
We got a message from the woman minding the turtles that "Miss Box" (our Mojave Burrowing Tortoise) has died. Miss Box had been with us for over 25 years and could easily have been over 125 years old. Nancy has made arrangement to have the shell preserved. And, Fang has had to be confined to a pen as he has shown is "hornyness" so much with the other turtles and she's calling him a "registered sex offender." And, the other turtles were 2-5 pounds bigger than he is!
One of the major industries in Puget Sound before airplanes and Microsoft was logging. The role of the Sound itself was the transport of raw logs from the place they were harvested to the lumber mills. To move the logs, the logs were formed into huge rafts, called "log booms", that were then towed to the mill by tugboats. To make the log booms, a frame of logs was chained together and the logs to be towed were floated inside the frame. The framing logs had large holes drilled through both end. A large chain is dropped through the hole in one log and then the adjacent log and coupled together.
The logging industry has pretty much gone to trucks now. But, artifacts of the logging era remain. The framing logs were eventually sawed up for lumber. To make them useful, the ends with the holes were sawed off and in most cases - just thrown away. These ends of the tow frames are often among the flotsam on the beach. The chains were also either discarded or lost. The chains would also float up on the beach (how can chain float?) .
The log ends and the chains are found in many of the older houses as yard decorations. We will be bringing the log end shown in the right-hand picture
