Seattle and Tahoma

Had a great spring weekend in early March with my sweetheart and I heading into Seattle on Friday night for dinner downtown (The Icon Grill) and The Music Man at the 5th Avenue Theatre.  Kinda took us back to our childhoods when it seems like musicals were a bigger part of the culture and swept across the country every so often.  It was a slower, preinternet time and would take a few years after the Broadway opening before the ripples would make it to Fircrest.   The Music Man movie and soundtrack was big for a while just before our teenage years and we had a blast reliving that.  It`s Broadway  premier was in 1958 which was the same year as West Side Story.  But while Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins all collaborated to make West Side Story,  Meredith Wilson wrote the book, music and lyrics for The Music Man himself.  And it was the first musical he had written, and he was 55 years old at the time.  And it won that year`s Tony.   Bruce Partridge reminded me the other day that the Beatles covered one of its songs, Till There Was You.

And then heading up to Ashford on Saturday morning with the kids and babies, leaving the fog (and Kari ( sure looking forward to her knee surgery and recovery)) behind into the clear sunny day.  We headed up a Mt Tahoma Trails Association trail to the Copper Creek hut, about 4 and a half miles and 1100 feet elevation from the gate where we parked the cars.

 

We had a variety of gear, from snowshoes to lightweight touring skiis to heavy duty Alpine Touring skiis.  There was a little gear envy going on, especially when we turned around after lunch and the skiiers could just mostly coast back.
 

The babies got out of their packs and into a photo shoot during our picnic lunch at the hut.The nine mile roundtrip wore me out, but we we still able to party when we got back to Foxsparrow and celebrated the March birthdays!



and then I scared myself.  We took it pretty easy Sunday morning ( three weeks still to Kari`s arthroscopic knee surgery),  but then in the afternoon I decided to drop a fat alder for next year`s firewood and to open the summer sunset view.  It got hung up in the top of another tree, which has happened to me a lot during the 35 years we`ve been here.  I did what I do when this  happens, which is cut off about 4 foot chunks one after another until the top finally falls over.  Everything was difficult this time, though.  Each time I sawed a chunk off, I had to wham it with a sledgehammer a bunch of times to knock it down.  And then about the 4th or 5th time when I was getting tired and thought I knew what I was doing,  I was standing at the head of the log pounding on it and instead of going sideways like it had everytime before it came towards me and went though  my legs.  So I`m scrambling to get off the m$#@ing tree and its all happening in slow motion and speeded up at the same time.  And then the top of the tree I`m now spraddling falls out of the neighbor tree and down and lifts the butt between my legs up about 10 feet off the ground.  "Luckily", it threw me off about 4 or 5 feet up from the ground, onto my back about 2 feet from my saw......  There could have been a million minor variations in the action that probably wouldn`t have ended so well for me.  I think I just used up one of my nine lives.  This was the first time a tree I`ve cut has ever touched me as part of the falling process.  And the hell of it is that Kari saw what I was up to about a half hour before this happened and came over and told me she didn`t like the looks of it and I laughed her off and shooed her away.  I felt chastened, subdued.  On this, the first day of daylight savings, I came into the house and put on my pj`s and slippers at 4:30 in the afternoon.  I had a quiet glass of wine, and thought about things.

 Affordable solar can`t arrive too soon  ~

The tree that tried to kill me.