Hey now! It's been forever since I last wrote! Well, I've been busy, that's for sure. I'll start telling things in mostly chronological order. So one day last week we had no power in the morning. Spencer tried the breakers, but that didn't help. Then we talked to someone from upstairs who said that they think that the power outage might have had something to do with the dead eagle in the road outside of our house.... Max and I went out to investigate, and sure enough, there was a big dead eagle out there. I like this picture, mostly because of Max. But they had the power turned back on for us in just a few hours.

Last weekend Spencer's mom and stepdad visited us here, which was great. We had a lot of fun! And it was good too because I had Friday off for the holiday. For the first few days that they were here, it was rainy and gross, unfortunately. But even then, we went down and saw the delivery boat come into town, and walked along the boardwalk. We went to the beach and just hung out at home too. On Saturday was the volunteer fire department fundraiser day, and so there was intertidal golf in the morning, then a salmon bbq dinner, then a dance, and we attended the dinner. It was very delicious of course, and we probably have never had fresher salmon than that before!

A funny thing happened when we were at the beach. On our way down we followed two couples of college-aged people. We got to the beach and they headed down the way. On the end where the trail comes out was the neighbor girl and her friends. So there were four of them, ages about 9-13, and they had three dogs. After a while we decided to head down the beach, and as we started to walk down, we saw one of the college guys run naked from behind a rock at the back of the beach down to the water, and I think we knew that because the water is so cold, he would be running back up the beach as we got closer. But then the girls started running down the beach with their dogs, and just as they passed us, the naked guy appeared again. The girls hadn't seen him the first time, and it surprised them, and they shrieked and squealed! And of course, he wasn't expecting that they would be there either, so them shrieking made him run even faster to go get his pants back on. We laughed and laughed, and it was very funny.

Our friend Naomi was in town last weekend too. She used to live in Bamfield but now lives in Vancouver, and had come out to visit for the weekend. We chatted with her for a bit at the salmon dinner, and then she came with us the next morning when we all went out for low tide. The weather finally improved that day, and it was a very nice time to be out. It was good to hang out with Naomi too. After low tide we rode in the boat a little bit all around, but we didn't get too far because all of us and Max in the little boat is a bit much for it.

On Monday I had to work again, and Spencer took his folks out for a lighter boatride (minus me and Max). They went out and saw one of the islands, and a porpoise, too.

So it was very nice to hang out with them, and I'm glad they came up to visit us.

I still feed the crabs in the crablab. Last weekend some of the experiment was messed up because four crabs had escaped from their tubs, or the tubs were knocked over. In any case, they had a war while they were out, and out of the four crabs I found: 1 with two claws, 1 with one claw, 1 with no claws, and 1 totally dead and mostly eaten. I don't know how they got out of their tubs. I can't figure it out because I don't think they could have escaped on their own, but I also don't think that anyone knocked them over. So it will remain a mystery. But now their lids are better secured, so it shouldn't happen again. I like feeding the crabs, it's good times.

I also still work on the newspaper. We recently met to decide which photos to include in a couple of fundraising calendars. The calendars have local photos taken by three of us who work on the paper. And they chose a whole bunch of my photos to include, which is pretty cool. I look forward to seeing them. The idea is to sell them this summer while the tourists are here. I thought it was a good idea, and they're cute little things that stand by themselves on your desk.

I saw some new photos yesterday of Wayne and Tracey's new baby boy, Owen, which was exciting. He was born on the 3rd. I'm excited to meet him when I go down to Oregon before the Dave concerts next month.

Anyhow, things are good. The weather is improved this week, although I really wish for some real hot summer weather. But today it should be around 70, and I'm going to spend the afternoon out on the shore with Spencer, helping him with one of his experiments. I will put on lots of sunscreen before I go out. I've had a peely nose the last couple of days from when we were out for low tide last weekend.

I hope you all are well, and I also am going to try to write more regularly from now on. I've also updated my photo gallery, so check it out if you haven't seen it lately. Cheers!