TGIF

Yay-it's Friday, and I'm so excited. I've had my coffee, I heard the Friday song, and life is good! Here's the funny thing...I work until 3 today, Bubba starts work at 3 and will be there till 11 tonight. Then I have to work tomorrow (unless it snows tonight).

So why am I so excited? As far as Fridays go, this one is kind of sucky. I can only assume it's 27 years of socialization.

But who cares? It's Friday!

The Business of Being Born

Last night I went to see the Business of Being Born with my badass future-mother-in-law. It was brought to Seattle by the Seattle Midwifery School, the first midwifery school in the United States. Afterward, there was a panel discussion by a local OB, a local midwife, and one of the women who started the Seattle Midwifery School, and Ricki Lake, who produced the documentary, and came up with the idea in the first place. The other two ladies had some serious credentials to their names too.

I would highly recommend seeing it. We all know that our health care system is broken. This looks at how that is affecting mothers, babies and families, and advocates for an alternative. The alternative that is generally accepted in almost every other developed country.

It all started when Ricki Lake had her first baby, and had a lot of interventions. When she got pregnant again, she started educating herself on her options, and found midwifery and homebirth.

I see the light!

So the really cool thing that I noticed a few days ago, was that as I was coming out of the bus tunnel at 4:46 in the afternoon was that it wasn't dark yet. Two weeks ago that was not the case!

Did you know that here in Seattle, we gain an average of 7 minutes of light per day? Wooooo.

Lower Hylebos Marsh

October 2005: This is the Lower Hylebos Marsh, as it was being created. This construction was happening as I started my job, and it is the first project I have worked on from the very beginning. This site is to mitigate damage to salmon habitat on Hylebos Creek, and those are side channels that are being excavated.

March 2006: This is the second volunteer event at the site. We had 25 people planting native trees and shrubs. I'm in the background helping our previous Board President's son dig holes and plant.

May 2006: This is just after all the planting was finished. We planted 30,000 plants on this site, which is 15 acres. You can see the plants starting to fill in a little.

April 2007: This is a similar view to the one above, but the site has filled in a lot since the previous year. I was out collecting data for a mini-thesis for the Wetland Science and Management Program I was in.

Goldfinch eggs at the Lower Hylebos Marsh. This is in spring 2007, and the site is now home to many species of birds.

My work

Aka: What the hell is a Restoration Ecologist???

I work for a non-profit called the Friends of the Hylebos, working to preserve and restore 740 acres along Hylebos Creek. I write restoration plans for sites, critique other restoration plans, manage up to 10 sites and 30 projects a year, hire crews, order plants, recruit volunteers to assist with planting.

My job is very diverse. It is really like 5 jobs wrapped up in 1, which is probably why I like it so much. I do some botany work, as I assess the plant growth and survival on my sites every year. It's funny, cause my experience has been in fish, and now I use all my fish knowledge to work with plants. I never thought I would be able to rattle off scientific names of native plants!

About volunteers: it is true that I work with up to 300 volunteers a year, and sometimes have work parties with up to 100 vounteers at a time, but volunteers only do about 10% of my work. I use volunteers for planting and for removing invasive species, and we treat them really well. We start off with complementary coffee and bagels (I also look for donations). Poverty Bay Coffee Company keeps my volunteers going! They donate coffee to every event I put on. We work for a couple hours, and then I run out and pick up the donated pizza. The Right Spot donates pizza to every event I have, also, sometimes as many as 15 large pizzas. After lunch we work for a couple more hours. At the end, everyone is surprised at just how much we accomplished.

The volunteerism is the public part of my work, and the easiest to understand, and the smallest part timewise.

I spend a lot of time in the fall, winter and spring outside managing crews as they install plants, or remove invasive species. I have one site that is 15 acres, and has multiple types of habitat. It was a restoration site to mitigate for damage to salmon habitat done over 25 years. Now a lot of companies that did the damage are being taken to court or settling out of court, and that money is used to create restoration sites that will benefit salmon.

Homebrew

Meet homebrew.

Bubba brewing beer.

I live with a boy, a dog and a different pet that burps and belches, and sometimes sighs. Its name is homebrew. It has a fairly short life span, a month max in the house, later in a keg outside our front door (which remember is in the basement, and therefore is in the back yard). And yes, it is that cold. It is colder outside than it is in our fridge. Anyway, if you knew where we lived, you could seriously stop by our house and fill up a pint with beer. It is currently pumpkin ale, and an India Pale Ale. We have a porter on the way. Bubba has a goal of having 4 kegs full at a time, each with a different beer. One dark, one light, one IPA, cause he's a freak for IPA, and one seasonal. Boy is obsessed. By the way, the kegs are only 5 gallons, not full kegs. We're not that bad!

Did I mention that he is also cultivating beer yeast? We have test tubes in the fridge of him isolating yeast strains. I bought him a 22 of some fabulous beer the night before we went snowshoeing, and he spent his Friday evening drinking great beer and looking at yeast reproduction websites. Seriously.

Snowcamping photos!

Clarire putting the pack on Tsuga. She loves her dogpack. It makes her feel very responsible, like she's got a job to do. Which means that it stops her from wanting to roar around the parking lot when she's just been released from the car. I didn't have the camera accessible, but she flew out of the car, and dove into the snow head first. Then she got up, and licked snow, and ran and dove head first into the snow again. And did this over and over...

Starting out. We've just left the populated areas, and are headed into the snowy backcountry. It is Bubba, Pat, Claire and me. Tsuga liked to try trailblazing, but she's kind of short.

Pat and Bubba

It's really hard to move when the dog is on my snowshoes. Will you look at that ridiculously joyous face though?! I love the tongue hanging out the side look.

I know the polite thing to do would be to discreetly delete this photo permanently, but it's so great! It's so true too. Sometimes you fall into a snowdrift, and it takes like 3 minutes to haul your ass out. The camera was slow, originally it was going to be a really cute picture of Claire laughing at herself for falling.

Pat.

Making our tent spot.

Our tents in the morning. There was 8 inches of snow accumulation overnight. We had to periodically knock snow off our tent through the night. I would wake up and realize that the wall of the tent was 2 inches from my face. It was so effing cold that I didn't sleep more than an hour at a time. Bubba was worried that our car would be towed, since we parked in a parking lot that would be plowed. I was a little worried about avalanches and finding our way back. At 4:30 in the morning we asked the other tent, who wasn't asleep either what time it was and when they wanted to leave. We were out of our tents by 6:30.

Snow dog

Pat and Claire

The avalanche danger was kind of high that weekend, and we had a couple avalanche slopes to cross. Not areas that had already avalanched, but areas that looked like they might. We went one at a time, and I was the last here. Tsuga is waiting anxiously at the bottom of the slope, making sure I'm safe.

Sliding down a steep part on my butt. Okay, so I fell...sometimes it's the easiest way down.

Our car in the morning. We dug so much snow that weekend. First the camping spot, then in the morning we had to dig out our tents, and when we got back, we had to dig out our car. They had plowed around us, which was really funny.

At the car. Notice the dog eating snow. It's classic Tsuga. She loves to eat snow. We were finally warm by this time. It's about 10:30 in the morning.

Clearly

I'm still figuring out this whole blogging thing. As is evidenced by the photos being out of order with the wrong labels.

Christmas at the beach

Ocean art.

The next day it was beautiful and sunny. Cold as cold as cold. That's Mary (Bubba's mom) and Michael (Bubba's brother) above.

I spent Christmas with Bubba's parents and brother at a friend's beach house. It was very peaceful and lazy, filled with good food and wine. It snowed on Christmas day.

The Christmassy house

Our house all dressed up for the holidays. Bjorn and Kelli snowshoed out into the forest to get this tree. I wish got to see Kelli 6 months preggie on snowshoes, helping haul a tree back!

I promised photos...

So, I live in Greenwood, in Seattle, in the basement apartment of a 2 bedroom house. Our landlord is friend, and lives upstairs with his fiance. They are both somewhere between my age and Bubba's age, and are expecting twins in a month and a half. Girls. Every now and then it will hit me, and I'll think-"Oh my god, there's two! Not one, but two babies!" I can't even imagine how they feel.

This is our house. That's right, the pirate house-aren't you jealous? And that's our car in the driveway. Fascinating, I'm sure. It looks like crap, I know, but that car is badass.

Snowcamping

Last weekend we, meaning me, Bubba, and two friends Pat and Claire (not a couple-they'll be at the wedding, so you can meet them later in the year), went snowshoeing/camping. Holy hell it was so effing cold! Snowcamping is an entirely different beast than regular camping, and I need a new sleeping bag before I can truly love it. It was so beautiful. We took Tsuga (Bubba's furry daughter, aka, the dog) with us, and she loves the snow. I have photos, but I have to figure out how to download the camera. I swear, it's just like having a regular camera. I'm still finding rolls of film I haven't developed yet, and I haven't used a film camera in 2 years!

love ya!