Monthly Archives: October 2008

The Two S’s

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Our cat Sam as a kitten sleeping in the heated bed

I’ve been slow getting pictures from my Washington trip online, partially because I’ve been really tied up at work, partially because I got sick for a bit, partially because I’ve been doing more editing than writing. And partially because a number of nights the Two S’s — Scout and Sam — have been sleeping on me when I sit down in my office. It’s hard enough to type when one of the cats is zonked out on me (Sam is sprawled over my lap right now) but it’s impossible with both of them aboard.

Sometimes they stretch out nose to tail, sometimes they curl up beside each other. It amuses me to see Scout assert her dominance after being submissive to Templeton all of her life. If Sam is sitting where she wants to be, she doesn’t swat him to get him to move, she just sits on him. If he’s OK with that, she doesn’t force him to move. Usually she’s more just nestled up against him, but one time she literally did sit on the little guy’s face.

I gave Templeton the nickname Little One when I first met him since he was smaller than the few cats I had known at the time. When we brought Scout home, the nickname worked for both of them since Scout turned out to be even smaller than Templeton. When we brought Emma and Sam home, we already knew Emma would be of average size, but Sam is now fully grown and he’s going to be a little thing like Scout.

Not quite as little as in this picture from January when he was still a kitten.

The Lidless Eye

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Foggy sunset seen from the Hurricane Hill Trail in the Hurricane Ridge area of Olympic National Park

I took this picture not from Mordor but Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. A fog was rolling in up high on the ridge just as the sun set, creating this circle of orange light around the setting sun. I’ve never seen this happen before, but it’s not a trick of photography or Photoshop, the circle was visible with the naked eye.

Look Ma, No Hands

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An American pika eating plants on the Palisades Lakes Trail in the Sunrise area of Mount Rainier National Park

This is yet another picture of the pika from the Palisades Lakes Trail in Mount Rainier National Park. Here it decided to eat the plants it brought back rather than store them for the winter.

I had a number of opportunities to watch pikas eating on this trip and realized something I had never noticed before: pikas don’t use their hands when they eat. Many mammals will use their front paws to guide plant stems into their mouths, but pikas pick up the entire stem with their mouth and eat a little bit at a time until the entire stem is gone. In this case, the stem was so long that the pika chewed the middle first to break it into two parts and then ate each part separately.

This was one of those times that I really wished my camera could capture video, the still pictures don’t do justice to how fascinated I was watching the pika devour these plants without ever raising a paw.

Where’s Boolie?

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Self-portrait in the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park

The past few years I’ve made it a point to take self-portraits as I travel on my hiking trips but I didn’t take any while at Mount Rainier National Park. Partially because I wasn’t in the mood, I didn’t want to take pictures of myself while pikas and marmots were around. Partially because I usually didn’t have the tripod along on the long hikes with thousands of feet in elevation change.

When I arrived in Olympic National Park, however, I was both in the mood and had the tripod along. I took some portraits in the Quinalt Rainforest during the couple of hours I had there, then the next morning took this one in the Hoh Rainforest. This one is probably my favorite self-portrait ever, it highlights both the massive size of these ancient trees and my silly mood.