Unearthing a life.....

Yesterday was my strongest day yet! In the morning, I went to CAPRI and did my exercise 'program'. Forty minutes on the treadmill, stationary bike, rowing/peddling machine, and a routine with hand weights. I was 'working' hard enough to break a sweat after five minutes and was able to keeping going for the full time. I coiuldn't have come close to that six weeks ago.

And there's something about exercise in the morning that seems to spur me on through the rest of the day. On the way home from CAPRI, I stopped at Cooleen Gardens and bought two more big pots and four bags of potting soil. After lunch, I drove up to the big nursery at Poulsbo and bought two more pots and a carload of plants. Then I spent the afternoon potting all my purchases and creating my 'container garden' out on the deck (using pots of vegetation in lieu of the missing handrail). Okay, I admit to there being a long sit-down break between assembling each potful.

During one of these breaks, Allie and I were being entertained by this squirrel. I finally slipped into the house and got my camera and got off thirteen shots. Only three were in good focus and the one above is the best of those. A couple evenings back, Kay and I were sitting out on the deck and a crow was raising holy hell (i.e., taking high umbrage) up in the trees. Shortly this squirrel came dashing down a tree trunk and the crow did its best to dive bomb him .... looked like he was trying to knock the squirrel off the tree.

Which reminds me of when I was a little boy listening to my Dad read stories out of a scrapbook he had assembled when he was a little boy. If memory serves me right, the stories were Thornton W. Burgess animal tales cut out of newspapers (probably the Spokesman Review of Spokane, WA) and glued in a scrapbook -- along with some very vintage comic strips from the 'funny papers'. Dad also had two or three tattered old hardbound Burgess books that he read to us. The one I recall most distinctly was 'The Adventures of Chatterer the Red Squirrel'.

There was not then, nor is there now, a bookstore in Othello, WA. Dad always said he "bought books off the train", but I'm not clear on what he meant by that. As a kid, I assumed he meant that he bought books from book peddlers who passed through selling books out the passenger car windows.

My folks were both readers and we always had a personal library of sorts in the railroad's 'company house' at Smyrna. I devoured it all, not that it was very heavy reading, but it did set reading habits that have seved me well over the decades ... and decades. That Smyrna library contained a few Boy Scouts and Hardy Boys books from my Dad's youth. The complete Nancy Drew books (Mom's). The complete Zane Grey novels. All the Tarzan novels. Oliver Curwood's books of the North country. That was the 'flavor' of literature at our house.

As I was entering my teen years, my mother joined a books-by-mail club. She received a copy of Boccacio's Decameron (not having any idea what it was) and shelved it without looking inside. It was somewhat illustrated! Racy illustrations! And I beat her to it. By the time she discovered what she had there, I'd already given it a very thorough reading so as not to miss any of the sexy parts.