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Photos from the past few days...

Peter, basketball with Ram

Scenes from our bike ride on the lower part of the Green River trail

We took our first ever trip to Fox Island (Sandspit Nature Preserve)

Sea anemones off a pier

These little fish literally were wiggling out of the sand, as the water went down. No idea what they were.

I brought my folding kayak, everyone tried it out

Views from a solo kayak trip in Lake Washington, starting at the boat launch north of Newport Shores.

Under the I-90 bridge

Jean and I sat out in the sun at Kelsey Creek Park

The temporary field hospital just next to the Humane Society. It has seen zero patients

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HYZs-rnXmHkKK6sJ2vwwSHU-LWH06mvu/view?usp=sharing

Planting raspberry bushes

I went very early to the Home Depot in Bellevue, and bought these raspberry bushes - the "shortcake" variety. 

For dinner tonight was Dutch Baby. Very similar to a popover, we had it with scrambled eggs and some fruit.

With Wendy at the Bellevue Botanical Garden. Lots of people there, most wearing masks. I brought some folding chairs and we sat and talked for a while on the lawn. Nice. 

Paint clean-up and Bellevue downtown park walk

My goal today was to clean up the paint in the garage, or at least get started on it. I set up some YouTube videos on my laptop, plugged in some speakers (otherwise my laptop sound is not powerful enough) and opened up old paint cans. The YouTube video was all about how the cure is worse than the disease--in other words, how the coronavirus lock down is causing more continuing harm that the coronavirus would have. And how it's now got a momentum of it's own.

Paint, spread out to dry

Kenny and Eric finished setting up Kenny's new boxing bag. He originally wanted a small boxing bag that sits on a springy pole, but everything that he was interested in was out of stock on Amazon. I put a message up on NextDoor, asking to buy one, and somebody offered him the below, for free. The guy lived very close by, too.

Kenny and his new boxing bag

Other than that--we went to the Bellevue Downtown Park again to walk around. Lots of people, but plenty of space to spread out.

Also took a look at the Medina Beach Park, as a potential kayak launch  location.

Kayaking on Phantom Lake and Stickyweed

Thank goodness Jean and I got out on the kayaks yesterday, because today (Saturday) the weather is cloudy and rainy. We met up with Ilana (on her kayak), and did a circumnavigation of Phantom Lake. 

I'm loving my new, easy-assembly folding kayak - the Inlet.

Getting some vitamin D - very important in avoiding respiratory infections, apparently!

A walk around the Coal Creek area again. I had planned to do some fixing of the trails, but there were so many people around that I didn't feel like it. Found this interesting old piece of iron. 

Thanks to the Google Lens app, I found out that this plant is Stickyweed, Galium aparine. Used by kids to make natural "camo" for their clothing, because it has burrs and sticks to everything. And also used to stuff mattresses in former times.

Another historic walk - Honeydew Creek

The walk for today was around the bottom of the May Creek area, the Honeydew Creek Trail. I was hoping to find a clear location for the old trestle bridge that crossed May Creek from the old railroad . However, I don't think we were that close. We did get to walk down on an interesting old closed-off road, though. The sign at the top said "Warning, slide danger". This landslide is what I think they were talking about.

Finding a geocache along the way.

An old car that must have crashed from the road above. Strange, though, because the road above was a dead end. 

Saw this treehouse on the way down from the northeast trailhead.

This is the from the website that allows you to layer historical maps over current maps. The map below shows my next target, which is the old road that previously led to the top of Somerset. I encountered it before, in the woods above South Bellevue Community Center. It was pretty clearly an old road, and now I can see where, exactly, it went. We'll head there today or tomorrow. 

A historic walk along Coal Creek

I've been interested in the old railroad track that delivered coal from the mines around Coal Creek to Lake Washington. I found some old maps online via the USGS historical map viewer (https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/), very low resolution, though.

We took a walk around this area, and I was able to see the old map, overlaid on the current map, on my phone as we walked. Very nice.

Now that I've been looking at these old maps, I was particularly interested in seeing all the coal mining relics along the trail. This is an old flume that delivered water to a power plant, that boiled it, with the coal from the site, to produce power that pulled the coal carts up from the mines.

Not quite sure what this was.

Here's a video of me doing some finger-picking (for the first time) on the ukulele.

Here's a few pictures from yesterday. We drove down to Gene Coulon park, the boat launch area. Eric and the kids went for a walk, and I took out my new Orukayak Inlet to do a little paddling. I made a few phone calls while I was paddling - my mom, via a Duo video call, was happy to get a live feed, including bald eagles. The orange thing on my paddle is the replacement drip guard I made out of a pool noodle.

The Boeing factory building. I assume it's pretty unoccupied now.

Ukulele videos on Youtube, litter pick-up and hair cuts

Before anyone else was up this morning, I made my first ukulele YouTube video. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CCvDTf0XlQ&t=2s

It's very imperfect. Some improvements to make are - either memorize the song, or put the lyrics and chords behind the camera, so it's not so conspicuous when I look at them. And make sure I actually can play the song without stumbling. 

But, it was fun to do, and so easy. I was just thinking about making a video, and wondering idly if I could do it directly through the YouTube app. Turns out that you can - just press the video icon on the main screen, and away you go!

Later on I went out with Jean on a litter-cleanup mission, behind the Walmart next to the Larson Lake blueberry fields. Last time we were there, a couple weeks back, there was loads of litter. This time, we were surprised that there was far less. Somebody must have come by and picked up much of it. But it turned out that if you looked a little more closely, there was still quite a bit of trash to pick up. We ended up mostly filling 2 kitchen-sized grocery bags. And then took a walk.

Then I gave the kids and Eric haircuts. I have almost a professional level setup - I have 2 trimmers, a cape, and a little brush to get the bits of hair off the skin after the haircut, etc. I always do them in the garage, even though it's a little chilly, because there's so much less clean-up. Nobody cares if there's a few stray hairs around.

Shopping, Cedar River bike ride, and "strawberry shortcake"

Peter has been talking lately about wanting to be a voice actor. So, I got a few nicer shots of him, sitting up against the stone wall. This is a natural smile - Kenny was making funny faces or something. 

Biking the Cedar River trail. It was pretty popular (although nowhere near crowded) despite the fact that all the parking areas were closed up. We stopped at the stony beach below, and had a snack. I picked up some litter that was scattered there. I think I'll try to make a point of doing that in the future. I put some plastic grocery bags in the daypack I always carry, to make it easy.

On the way home, we stopped at the McDonalds drive-through. Kenny wanted to get his standard pancake meal, but they now have a very limited menu, and that wasn't one of the options. I wonder how many people are still working there...

And this was Peter's project this afternoon. He wanted to make strawberry shortcake, and this is what we were able to make with what was on-hand. Yellow cake mix, half-and-half mixed with pudding powder (to stiffen it up), and then some sliced strawberries on top.

Catching up on a few days...

It's been a quiet few days. I did some productive consulting work the first part of the week. Another project now is getting some of my favorite songs set up in my Ukulele songbook (my personal one). I was introduced to most of them via The Daily Ukulele and The Daily Ukulele - Leap Year Edition. I gave Kenny a programming project, which was to format the song lyrics and ukulele chord notation in a certain way, to make it easier for me to read. Wonder how he'll do with it. If he can make something that works for me, he'll get screen time and I'll also pay him.

I sold another copy of my book Weigh Every Day yesterday. I haven't sold a copy in about a month. The sale made me think - should I start working on it again, the website and promoting it? It's interesting that obesity is such a huge risk factor for coronavirus. Will this cause a surge of interest in losing weight?

The below is from a walk we took at Gene Coulon park. I've seen this kind of thing a few times - people meeting up in parking lots, but still maintaining lots of physical distance.

And these pictures are from making microwave potato chips. They're extremely tasty. A little tedious to make, though. I use the mandolin to make thin, even slices of raw potato, brush oil and sprinkle salt on them, and then put them in the microwave (on a sheet of parchment paper that can be reused) until they turn brown.

Coronavirus quarantine - Kayaking, and some consulting work

I went on another scheduled kayak trip, "with" Jean (she and I were kayaking at the same time, she in Lake Sammamish, and I in Lake Washington.). Worked out well, as before. I really like my new Orukayak. It's definitely not as fast, but so easy to assemble and disassemble that it makes up for it. I put the kayak in at the boat launch right next to Newport Shores. There was already a kayaker there, who gave me the lowdown - free car parking, but there's only 2 spots, so get there early. I went into the Newport Shores neighborhood, the one with canals. Interesting to look at all the houses there. 

Then I kayaked over to the Slough area. There were about 3 kayakers that I saw around there. Apparently the boat launch there is still open, I didn't think it was with all the Light Rail construction

Funny "lighthouse" at the entry to Newport Shores. Very dilapidated, like the house it belonged to.

This house had LOTS of seating. A party house?

Cormorant, sunning itself

Some turtles

Then in the afternoon, 5 solid hours of consulting work. Actually, Trish had contacted me in the morning, asking if I could be there for a 10 am conference call, I said no. There was a lot of stuff to catch up on. I got some good information on deadlock reporting - there's some built-in to SQL, in the later versions. Not a lot of good info on them, though. Maybe I'll write up another "databases are fun" blog post on this deadlock reporting that I'm working on, especially once I have it really going. 

We ordered out for dinner today - 5 guys.I didn't have Eric order anything for me, I stuck with a sandwich at home.