A Flood-Free Version of Father's Day

Mark, thanks for sharing your experience with the hellish weather over there. It sounds like you're all battening down the hatches and trying your best to keep dry. Sorry to hear (via G&J on the phone earlier) that the O'C-Longs are having troubles with the basement.



I think/hope Matt had a great day as the father in our nuclear family. I made him a quiche for breakfast--he's a real man. We gave him his presents, a wonderful lithograph of a Tlingit salmon that I picked for him in Alaska, and a Sibley's Bird Guide that he'd asked for. Then we loaded up and went mushroom hunting. We struck out today, probably in the main because we didn't go somewhere we know there are 'shrooms. But we had a great hike around in the woods. Freya found some buttercup-like flowers and tossed the blooms into a little creek, and Grover the Dog dove on them and sent her into gales of laughter. She also took her first tumble in the woods--she didn't realize she couldn't just take off running down a hill covered in fallen branches, and we couldn't catch her in time. Thankfully, she came to no grievous damage.


We stopped at Pizzalchik, a really great roasted chicken and pizza place on the other end of Boise, when we came back in to town and we got a chicken with roasted garlic cooked underneath its skin. It's one of Matt's favorites, but they're usually too far away for us to drive.


Then I put him to work. We went to Lowe's and picked up some mulch and a new tree--a weeping cherry, which he just planted off of one corner of our patio. It looks great, and balances out the flower bed Freya and I planted yesterday. The back yard is coming along nicely.
And now he's sacked out on the couch watching baseball. That's a good Father's Day, right?



My Alaska trip was tremendous--if it wasn't for the winter months full of darkness, I'd be pushing Matt pretty hard for us all to move up there. I'm attaching a picture from a day we went to Galena, which is about 1000 miles up the Yukon River from the Bering Sea. The village is population 675, and is the site of a former Cold War Air Force base that is now mainly defunct. Our tour guides would say things like, "That used to be a hangar...that used to be the cannery...that used to be the other grocery store." Not much going on in Galena anymore. One of the fire guys took us out for a little tour in a jet boat and we crossed the river to check out a 2004 wildfire site. We were provided with protective headgear to keep the mosquitos away. No one else wore theirs and I can't figure out why--I was the only one who didn't have "skeets" all over her face. See below, and also take note of my fetching gum boots. Queen of the Yukon, I tell you.






Anyway, happy Father's Day from the Queen of the Yukon, her prince consort, and the Princess of All She Surveys.