Dusk at Seward Park.

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Our friend Daniel was riding in the back of a Greyhound through Idaho. He liked the back of the bus because it cleared out so fast whenever there was a smoke break ( Read more... )

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Our friend Lucas turned four years old today and is pictured in his birthday garb below. Lucas is fond of cars and gadgets and space and planes and rockets and especially my Classic black-and-gray iPod.

A couple days ago Lucas' mom, a naturalist, sent me a note about a conversation she had just had with Lucas.

Lucas brings in a rolly polly and says ( Read more... )

Lisa and I were busy taking all the boxes that friends (yes, thank you Peter) had helped me move up to the second story office in the wonderful historic building in Port Angeles back down the stairs and packing them into a U-Haul truck. As I drove home to Seattle, reunited with Things, I was amused that this 'move' wasn't the start of a new life, ( Read more... )

My wife Lisa and I are both working freelance and writing books. Lisa's book is a kid-friendly natural science piece on the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The book I'm finishing is full of stories like the anecdotes I put in this blog, but they're the stories that merit being in a book instead of whizzing out into the Internet ( Read more... )

Back when Lisa was a Park Service Ranger she had an archeologist friend who got bit by a rattlesnake while hiking at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He was hiking alone in the days before cell phones, off-duty so he didn’t have a radio to call in anyone with higher medical skillz. He ran the three miles back to his car. He had a six-pack of beer in ( Read more... )

While I’m waiting for a library copy of The Superorganism: the Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, http://www.powells.com/biblio/7-9780393067040-4, here are a couple surprising things I’ve learned about ants from recent New York Times science sections.

A researcher named Anna Dornhaus discovered that a bizarrely high ( Read more... )

Our hottest days of the year and I’ve been sick with a cold. Today, voiceless, I walked around WotC with a dry erase slate helpfully provided by Logan, scribbling quickly blurry blue notes until I found a painful whisper mid-afternoon.

Driving home, realizing that I wouldn’t mind rain, I thought about snow. Two happy memories of snow tumbled up ( Read more... )