On Tuesday, Elizabeth and Dode got to go whale watching as part of a school field trip. They started from the Everett marina for their 2 1/2 hour tour. The tour company they went with guarantees you'll see a whale or they'll keep giving you free tickets until you do. They saw six whales while on the tour.
They left the marina in Everett on a nice spring day.
The hospital my mom works at is the large white building on the left.
some of the wildlife, harbor seals
Dode says that whales aren't very photogenic
He also says they have a serious case of bad breath
When they'd exhale upwind from the boat, it was quite stinky
They were off to the side of a group of whales when the announcer said, "We abide by the regulations about how far we stay away from whales but as you can see, not all boaters follow the rules." Imagine Dode's surprise when he got a better look at the boat they were to referring to, my favorite Old Salt, my grandpa!
smooth sailing grandpa!
They found the whales near Hat Island, where my grandpa lives.
Next up, Boat Watching
While I was gone teaching at National Camp School, Dode was home holding down the fort. He decided to take the kids to an RC boat race at Twin Lakes park, near our home. Miriam was excited all morning and just couldn't wait to go. Once she'd been there about five minutes, she was ready to go home. Elizabeth was having a stomach ache and visiting the bathroom every ten minutes. Good times for all!
the best part of racing is the crashes
The red boat did a 360 flip in the air, landed on it's bottom and kept going
and more...
Friday night while I was gone, Dode got up from the dinner table and helped push himself up by pushing down on it. He was quite surprised when the table sank beneath his hands. He got down on the ground to see what was going on. One of the table legs that William sits in front of was strangely missing a bolt. When Dode pushed on the table, the leg came loose and was falling off. When asked, William wasn't sure what could have happened to the bolt. The next morning when Isaac was picking up dirty clothes, he found the missing hardware in William's pants pocket. I sew all the pockets in William's clothes but I'd left the little coin pocket that most jeans have, thinking it was just too small for him to put anything in. I was wrong. Isaac found the table hardware, a stamp and a pieces of wood jammed in the tiny pocket. Time to go back through the pants and sew all the coin pockets as well!
On Saturday, Elizabeth went over to Haggen and came home with a sample of cake. She left it on the kitchen table but when she came back a while later, it was missing. She knew right away who the guilty party was and started questioning William about where it could be. After a while, he folded and said, "Maybe... you should look on the island." She looked on the kitchen island but couldn't find it. Under more questioning he said, "Maybe.... you should look under the newspaper." She looked under the newspaper and getting more exasperated inquired some more until he said, "Maybe.... you should look under the other newspaper." Voila, there was the cake! He's such a psychic!
Triple Bummer
Isaac took his RC nitro car to a friend's house on Saturday and managed to seize up the engine and strip out the gears. His car is so beat up now, it's not worth fixing so we're in the market for a new one. He told us if we found one on craigslist now, we could put it away and call it a birthday present in June. Monday night, Dode drove down to Mill Creek (40 minutes away) to look at one that sounded promising. What he found was one as beat up as Isaac's. He was told it ran but the person selling it just didn't feel like starting it up. By that point, Dode had received enough conflicting information to decide that it just wasn't the car for us. We'll have to keep looking.
Miriam accidentally knocked over the glass lamp in my room. She came to tell me she'd broken it and she said, "it's just little pieces". I finished what I was doing and went upstairs to assess the damage. I figured I'd be using some superglue to put things back together. Well, when she said "little pieces" what she meant was, the lamp was in little pieces. The top absolutely exploded. There were shards of glass 10 feet across the room. I don't have the patience for that kind of superglueing!
Jacob had his primary mode of transportation, his bicycle, stolen a few months ago while he was volunteering at the hospital. I've told the other kids to lock up their bikes so he doesn't borrow them, refuse to lock them up, and get them stolen too. I'd been letting him borrow my bike which is no prize. We bought it at a pawn shop about ten years ago. Seven years ago, the kids left it behind Sheri's car when I was in the hospital having Miriam and she was babysitting. We straightened out the damage the best we could but one pedal was always at a strange angle. Well, Thursday someone near where Jacob works decided they'd like a bike just like mine, rusted, with a crooked pedal and ripped seat. Now Jacob is down to walking where he needs to go (changing his commute to work from 12 minutes to a half hour) and I no longer have a bike. I got home from National Camp School Sunday evening, totally exhausted and one of the first things I heard was that my bike was gone. It was pretty aggravating!
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