Life List

I added two new items to the life list today:

-Live in a house with a secret door or room.

Wouldn't this be grand? Especially if you had kids? We have a tiny little door in one of our closets that leads into the kitchen that both the baby and the dog love zipping through. I'm not counting it though because the kitchen door, while it looks somewhat like a pantry door, isn't secret enough.

-Try to visit one new foreign country every year

Of course, realistically speaking, this isn't going to happen. Finances, babies, and life has a way of intruding upon one's grand travel schemes. But perhaps by jotting it down on paper it'll urge us to keep moving and exploring.

So there we have it. Two new goals.

photo credit: here via peter pennoyer architects.

Ben's Baby Book

Blog Peeps!

[Warning: This is a super, duper long post]

I am so excited to show you Benjamin's baby book. Actually, it's not just a baby book. 

It's a baby book, journal, and birthday book. 

Let me explain. But first I'll show you the cover:

portable shelter - just add snow

Lovelies,

I was looking at my life list the other day and came across this entry: spend the night in an igloo. And then today I happened upon a sweet igloo adventure in the NYTimes.

I always thought it would be something we'd do in Alaska but perhaps a trip east is in our future. Although, frankly, the thought Of skiing all day and then spending several hours constructing one's nightly shelter seems a little excessive.

Read the NYTimes article here. Photo: NYTimes.

The Great Lake Washington Swim

Ok, here are the swim details. The plan was to to start from Mom and Dad's dock in Seattle and swim east, across the lake to St. Edwards State Park. 

Originally we were going to swim in a slight southeast direction, with our eventual destination the beach at St. Ed's. 

Sunday was a bit chilly (55 degrees) with a slight breeze from the south. We were to find that the resulting waves made for some interesting swimming: it was hard to get into a good rhythm, as turning your head to get a breath often resulted in a mouthful of water. 

 Prepping. Dad had a tri suit, I had a shorty and Chris nothing but a swimsuit. He was going to be the coldest of all. 

 Mom was in the safety launch

 Papa had rented a small trolling motor so Karin could pace us in the sailboat. The board in back was for resting, should the swimmers feel the need for a break (or were too tired to climb into the sailboat). 

We don't have any pictures of the actual swim, so I'll give you the written run-down: We got off to a slow start. The water was COLD and, as I mentioned earlier, it was hard to get into a rhythm. It was also intimidating to see how very far we had to swim to reach the park. 

One of our unanticipated problems was how difficult to swim in the right direction. Sounds simple, right? Not so much. Since you breathe to the side (and don't look straight ahead), it was easy to get going off course. This was an added complication as we were trying to stay together as a group. 

About halfway through I eventually worked out a breathe/look ahead combo movement that seemed to work decently well. I should have done some more research in this department. 

We were about 1/4 done when Mom let out a few blasts on the emergency horn. Her boat was dead in the water. We swam over and discovered that the propellor on the trolling motor had dropped off. 

Our rescue launch was now out of commission. 

Problem. 

Fortunately, dad had thoughtfully brought along some sheet power. Mom ran up the jibe and was able to cruise along at our approximate speed. This is not an ideal solution, given that her mobility was severly compromised and that she would be unable to come to our immediate rescue, should something go wrong. 

It was at this point that we decided to swim straight across to the nearest shore, rather than continuing on to the beach. The area in front of St. Ed's is a busy boat lane and we weren't willing to continue without a chase boat in the immediate vicinity. 

We had a bit of a tense moment when a fishing boat roared by Chris at full speed. I was further behind and wasn't able to accurately gage the distance between Chris and the boat. Frankly, it looked like it was going to run right over the top of my husband. Not a fun scene to watch. Chris later mentioned that it wasn't really close at all, but it made me particularly wary for the remainder of the swim. I kept stopping to look around for approaching boats. 

The end was actually uneventful: we clambered up on shore, decided it was too cold out of the water, and make a quick swim back and into the boat. From there it was a short sail back to the dock. 

 Happy to be done.

Check it off the list!

The Great Lake Washington Swim is DONE

60 degree water temp. 50 minutes crossing time.  One lost engine propellor. Three tired but happy swimmers.

And most importantly, an awesome captain piloting the safety launch.

pictures to come shortly. 

-Sonja and Chris

Plans.

Readers!

The theme for the coming months in the J Household is:

A Pacific Northwest Summer.

Instead of being our normal lazy selves on the weekends (have I told you about my legendary napping habit?), we're going to go forth! Be active. Be adventurous. Explore! Cheaply.

I know, this is not a new concept.

But we're not going for originality. Just a good time.

In fact, we've already dipped our toes into this impulsive, mostly-local adventuring with our Olympics trip in Vancouver BC and the  WA Coast Trip to Chinook and Grayland Beach. And our non-local trip to NorCal.

Next up is a weekend trip to Victoria. We're looking forward to exploring the city, watching some sailing, and sipping tea at the Fairmont Empress. Or maybe just settling for a beer at a pub. We're not sure yet.

A few other additional activities that we're tossing around for the summer include:

Exploring Mt St. Helens (I've never been, in all the years that I've lived in WA).
Soaking in a tub at Goldmeyer Hot Springs.
Camping at Cape Alava in the Olympic National Park. Maybe tackling Hurricane Ridge, as well.
Backpacking. More than once. Maybe in Spider Meadow?

Other not-so-local adventures that will have to wait a few years are:

Bear-watching in Alaska
Yellowstone exploring
Springtime in Death Valley
Mountain biking or trekking in Moab/Arches National Park
Sierra Nevada Mountains (specifically, the Sierra Club Lodge outside of Truckee, CA)
Grand Canyon (To the bottom! And then back up!)

And, of course, between this adventurous exploring, we'll be attempting to complete loads o' house stuff. Fun activities like mowing the lawn, painting the kitchen, and chasing chickens. Can't wait.

What are your favorite local activities?

My lovelies,

The gals up in Anchorage (Cherie, Alex, and Katherine) completed a sprint triathlon this weekend. I am in awe of their accomplishments.

So much so, that I busily browsed the internet for Seattle's triathlon offerings. I'm moderately confidant that I could manage both the swimming (1/2 mile) and the biking (12 miles). I'm just not sure about the running (3.1 miles). I am not a runner. Period.

I wonder if the triathlon organizers would accept a non-running substitution to the event. Like in-line skating. Or canoe paddling.

Clearly, we're still pondering this option.


In other news, our team for the GREAT LAKE WASHINGTON SWIM continues to expand. And I could not be more thrilled. The more, the merrier.

Life List

Crossed a few things off the life list this spring:

■ Build and maintain a sod roof (Spring 2010) [still working on the growing part but I'm crossing it off because the vast majority of the initial work is completed]

■ Attend an Olympic Games (Vancouver Winter Games, February 2010) [Awesome, incredible, fantastic, overpriced]

Here are the items that I'd like to take a crack at this year (including a few new ones):

□ Learn to knit [Paging Megan. ]

□ Hike to a fire lookout and spend the night. Look for fires.Or just enjoy the view.

□ Paint a house [our house needs it, desperately]

□ Go watch a hamster race [This one has been on the list forever, thanks to Heather Fields]

□ Tour a temple in Southeast Asia [This is a big maybe. But we're going to try for the far east this year]

□ See Old Faithful in Yellowstone.

□ Swim the width of Lake Washington (approx 1 mile). Convince my dad to go with me. [the date is set. Our team is ready. I am a-practicing!]

□ Stay with Chris at the Sierra Club’s Clair Tappan Lodge near Donner Lake. A Frey family tradition.

□ Write a letter to myself to be opened in 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years. [I think I wrote the one year version. Now I just have to find it. And work on the other two]

□ Think of a place where you’d want your ashes to be spread [Yes, this is totally morbid. BUT, it came up the other day and Chris is all set to go [meaning that he has a location]. So I need to have a place too. Plus, I'm all about planning for this kind of thing. Which reminds me, it's about time to update our will. Have you updated your will lately? Including your living will? So very important, folks.]

And there you have it. The goals have been set. 

And, begin!

How to do Flip Turns in a Pool

In preparation for our big Lake Washington Swim, I've been heading to the pool a few times a week for some practice runs. After a month of doggy paddling, I decided the other day that I should buckle down and starting some serious training. Something besides the trusty breast stroke. And dog paddle.

Unfortunately, I find freestyle to be exceedingly boring: nothing to look at, same endless back and forth, etc. So says the girl that stared at the back of someone's head for eight years in a crew shell. Right.

Anyway, I decided that it was time to learn the flip turn. It gives me something to look forward to at the end of the lap. And prevents me from stopping to take a break in the shallow end.

The dreaded flip turn. So many scraped feet and bumped heads. And so many instances of thinking that I'd completed the turn correctly, only to find myself headed straight towards the bottom or, even worse, in somebody else's lane. Once the lifeguards decided that all the flopping and splashing wasn't an attempted drowning, they kindly began ignoring me. Which was nice. Since having an audience is the last thing I desire.

Thank god for YouTube. There is a how-to for everything, including flip turns. My goal for this week is to try and limit my windmilling arms. And keep attempting to do the flip turn at the shallow end. Which SO much more difficult. And painful.

Swimming Lake Washington

One of my life list items that I'd like to check off this summer is this one:

No. 72: Swim the width of Lake Washington. Convince my dad to go with me.

I've already completed the [easy] half: my dad is up to the challenge. As is Chris. And Alex. Which is great except that Alex is just about the fastest swimmer in the world and she's going to be half way across the lake by the time I've paddled 10 strokes. Readers, I need to start training RIGHT NOW. 

Anyway, I hopped on Google this morning and whipped up a few route maps. Both leave from my parent's dock in NE Seattle and end up across the lake at St. Edward State Park:

The only difference is that Route A (4,500 ft) is the shortest route across the lake to the park. Route B is slightly longer (5,000 ft) but it arrives at the sweet little beach. 

As you know, 1 mile = 5,280 feet so the long route is approximately 300 feet shy of that lovely milestone. Depending on how we're feeling, we could swim back out into the lake for a few hundred feet just to say that we swam a mile. 

Right, off to go practice my swimming.

Life List

Every six months or so I sit down and update my life list. 

Life lists have become rather popular of late and have also acquired a certain cheese factor. That's ok though, I like popular cheese, on occasion. 

Heaven forbid that you call them bucket lists, however, a name which is even more awful than life list. 

That said, I've had mine for years and I take great pleasure from checking things off.

I'm a list kind of person. 

Since I last updated, I've crossed off a few things:

□ Travel to all seven continents and swim/dive in all four of the world’s oceans:

                        ■ Africa (September 2009)

■ Attend an Olympic Games. (Vancouver, February 2010)

■ Go on Safari  (September 2009, Botswana and Zambia)

■ Buy a house. (April 2009.)

■ Become a beekeeper (April 2009)

This one is a mere month away, once I get that dirt hauled up onto the shed roof:

□ Build and maintain a sod roof

I also added a few new ones, including this one:

□ Write letters to myself to be opened in 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years. 

Isn't this a sweet idea? Now I just have to sit down and write the letters. 

(some guy's random list. He has some good ideas, a few others I think I might skip thought)

So, without further ado, here's the current list:


(see more after the Jump)

Life List

As of last weekend, I can now check a total of three things off my life list. I need to be better about keeping it up to date. Frankly, it's not very often that I get to check things off the list so I'm not very good about doing it promptly. Here are the items:

□ Bicycle at least 100 miles in one day [STP, July 11, 2009. 115 miles]
□ Own at least two live chickens and possibly a goat or an alpaca (or both) [Still working on the goat/alpaca part but we have THREE chickens so I'm crossing it off]
□ Take a pottery class [Aardvark Pottery, Santa Ana, CA. Fall/Winter 2008]

Natural Building Materials

Ok, so I have this strange fascination with natural building materials (Straw bale, rammed earth, adobe etc) so I was particularly excited to read this article this morning about a cob house in Seattle. I'm not very enamored with the inside of their cottage (a bit claustrophobic, perhaps?), but I was stoked that they had the article, nonetheless.
I've been doing some light reading regarding natural building components and gray water system and here are some useful links:

http://naturalbuildingnetwork.org/
http://www.cobcottage.com
http://naturalbuildingschool.org/

More Whale Watching Pictures

Sonja and Mindy
Gina, Colleen, Mindy and Sonja (on the phone with Carla)

Scouting for whales

Blue Whale Watching

On Saturday I drove up to Long Beach with a couple of friends and boarded a boat in search of the blue whale. The krill population off the coast of Southern California has been exceptional this year and it is drawing blue whales in record numbers. Most people are guessing that whales haven't been seen in these numbers since before commercial hunting began, sometime in the 1920s.

Unfortunately, this has had some rather tragic consequences has four whales have been killed by large ships going to Long Beach/Los Angeles Harbor in the past couple weeks. Biologists aren't sure why the whales are not able to move out of the way. Ideas range from sonar inhibition, illness, or not judging the speed at which the ships are moving.
Of course, you actually don't see a whole lot of the whale from above the water. Going below the water with these behemoths would be a braver person than I. But it was pretty impressive, all the same. It was clear to me, even from the very little above-water scenes, that blue whales constitute a lot of mammal. I dove with wild dolphins in Costa Rica and was impressed at their size. I cannot imagine diving with a blue whale.

If you have the time, wikipedia has an interesting article on the blue whale, including some of their vocalizations. Actually, I was mainly impressed by how little is know about the blue whale in terms of size, longevity, and breeding practices.
Unfortunately, my digital camera doesn't have a very large zoom so my pictures aren't very impressive. I also took some regular film pictures since I've got an enormous lens on that one. I'll have them printed to a cd and post those in a week or two (hopefully some of them turned out).

In addition to several whales, we saw false killer whales, common dolphins, and a rare treat, the risso's dolphin, which is an unusually pale mammal. Colleen and Mindy enjoying the sun

The Queen Mary

Colleen and her husband Chris

Katrina and Bob. Evidently Katrina had never been on a large boat before and was terrified when we hit the open ocean. She soon recovered though which was more than could be said for poor Bob who (shortly after this picture was taken) retired to the bathroom for the remainder of the trip due to severe seasickness.

Me, looking very windblown.

Here are some professional pictures of the animals we saw since mine weren't very good:

False Killer Whale (Pseudorca crassidens)

Risso's Dolphin (Grampus griseus)

The Common Dolphin (Delphinus delphis) (Actually, we nicknamed this one the "Uncommon" Dolphin since it was by far the most acrobatic of the bunch. Of course, I didn't manage any pictures of the dolphins out of the water.

The Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus) (taken by a seriously gutsy photographer)

More Life List

It looks like we may be one step closer to swimming with the whale sharks. We just put down our deposit for an April trip to Belize with my parents. We're going to spend some time scuba diving on a coral atoll before heading down to the southern part of the country to see if we can spot the whale shark, the world's largest fish.


We're going to be staying at Long Caye (pronounced "key"), an island owned by a company out of Utah called Slickrock. The padres and I stayed here in 2001 after our trip to Costa Rica. Long Caye is perched directly on the edge on the continental shelf; consequently, there is a drop of approximately 2,000 feet down to the sea floor. That wall, which starts only 30 feet below the surface, is a fabulous ecosystem and contains lots of fish, sharks, turtles, and eels.

Reader be warned, however: Long Caye probably isn't the place to go if your definition of vacation includes cable tv and a spa. While you have your own cabana on the beach, there isn't any electricity and they have communal composting toilets. Definitely not for everyone. But your dinner is pulled directly from the ocean each night and you can't beat the star gazing from a hammock on the beach.

Santiago Creek Watershed Preservation & Restoration Project

Today I took a trip over to Santiago Park to learn more about the watershed restoration project that is ongoing. Frankly, things look pretty dry and barren at the moment but they've been working hard to clean up the trash and plant natives throughout the area. I think part of my problem stems from the fact that I grew up in the lush, rain-soaked environs of Seattle: when I think of "riparian environment" it brings to mind fish, plants and, most importantly, water. Southern California is a bit different. Santiago Creek is an intermittent stream, meaning that is only flows during the winter months. Fast forward to today, and it was a dry as a bone (and very brown). No plants, fish or water. In fact, they're so confident that there won't be any water during the summer that they built the parking lot in the stream bed back in the 1950s. This makes it difficult to return it to it's natural state.
I met with the on-site naturalist who was a very nice fellow and was very enthusiastic about the project. Evidently they're set to open up a new visitor's center in October and will definitely need volunteers. So, we'll see what happens. I was also interested to learn that they're trying to create a bike trail all the way from Orange down to the Santa Ana River bike trail along Santiago Creek. That would be quite the achievement and I'd definitely be interested in volunteering with that effort.
I'll keep you posted. The website can be found here.

The Life List

A couple months ago on this blog I posted a list of places I wanted to travel to before I expired. That post was part of a larger internal list of things that I'd like to accomplish during my lifetime. I was reminded of it the other day because NPR had an article of the new "life list" fad that is popping up, partly thanks to various life list websites. I actually like the exercise of sitting down and thinking about the things (large and small) that you'd like to accomplish. That part is almost more important than the actual list. So, here are a couple (seriously!) of my life goals:

Sonja’s Life List

black box = accomplished

□ Dive with Whale Sharks in Belize

□ Restore a Riparian Habitat with Native Plants

■ Ride in an hot air balloon

□ Visit McNeil National Park in Alaska and watch the grizzly bears fish

■ Travel around Europe with a backpack

□ Build a rammed earth house

□ Dive the Great Barrier Reef

□ Use solar energy and give back to the power grid

□ Go watch a hamster race (According to my co-worker Heather,

hamster races are hilarious and they have them frequently at PetSmart. )

□ See a blue whale

□ Dive with Great White Sharks

□ Read the Bible (all of it) and the Koran

□ Design and implement a gray water system

□ See the herd migration in the Great Rift Valley

□ Grow an organic garden

■ Surf

□ Bicycle at least 100 miles in a race

□ Design a water garden with koi, turtles, and frogs

□ See one really great concert

□ Own at least two live chickens

□ Go to the Olympics (summer or winter)

□ Take a bicycle repair/maintenance class

■ See a turtle lay eggs on the beach in the middle of the night

□ Ride an elephant

□ Take a trip with the Nature Conservancy

□ Renovate a home

□ Take a pottery class

□ Perfect a 5-course meal

□ Have lots of dogs

■ Plan my wedding

□ Paint a house

□ Give blood 10 times (1 down)

□ See molten lava

■ Go horseback riding on the beach

■ Have my own website