No, not Greg and me. Just the punkinbrains. S2B and Nity headed off to the Palm Springs area for a week of fun and sun with their grandparents. Here is a piece of email from my Mamacita:

After 4 hours, I have retrieved two water logged children from the pool. Naturally they ate their grilled cheese lunches in the pool (on the little wall dividing the pool from the spa). After lunch, we watched two talented trainers and their dolphins give performances. Seems dolphins are highly motivated to do all sorts of tricks if given enough fish as treats. The girl dolphin was so smart she even counted the quarters she found on the bottom of the pool. Amazing.

Evidently, my childrens’ powers of playfulness and imagination haven’t diminished ~ we’ve spent hours and hours pretending we were a family of you-name-it (cats, chickadees, frogs, etc). The Lang Olympics have also been particularly rewarding in the creativity department. It’s been entertaining to raise these munchkins.

Spent the morning up in the mountains, blowing snow around with the Huey. It’s always good to get out and train in different environments. We were up atop a pinnacle and I had never seen such a big snowcloud as the one we created with the helo. Would have been nice to have had wipers on our visors as Paul and I leaned out the doors to check the landing zone. That, and some hot cocoa ~ it was a tad bit chilly in that there rotor wash!

Views were awesome ~ we could see from Rainier to Baker, the Olympics & Cascades, downtown Seattle and Bellevue ~ very nice.

Yes folks, this was a doozy of a low-brow evening. Ice Motorcycle Racing! Wooot! I had never even heard of this exciting and intoxicating sport (literally intoxicating ~ the nitromethane fumes in the arena were stupefying in every sense of the word) until a dear old friend of mine gathered a bunch of us together last night to breathe the vapours deeply.

I guess the funniest part is that Greg rarely likes to go out, at least not to the events I usually suggest. But Ice Motorcycle Racing? Oh yeah, baby, he was all over that. Spikes, bikes, ice, wrecks, possible blood and death ~ sign him up! Clearly, I need a new direction for our entertainment choices. It really was fun, I must admit, despite the minor hearing loss for several hours afterwards.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6hh3vCnXT8]

It’s practically boring to continue to blog about how exciting the weather has been; the extreme has been commonplace this fall. But, that being said, here are the latest headlines:

SEATTLE – Another destructive storm is barreling down on Western Washington and people are urged to take extreme caution when outside. Forecasters say it may top the destructive force of an early 1990s windstorm that left six people dead.

“This is the strongest storm since the Inauguration Day storm,” said University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass.

Coast and Strait of Juan de Fuca:
– 40 mph winds with gusts to 65 mph
– Strongest winds 9 p.m. on the coast, midnight on the strait with gust to 80 or 90 mph
– A high surf warning is in effect until 10 pm Friday
– A coastal flood advisory in effect from 4 p.m. today to 12 p.m. Friday
– Whidbey Island also vulnerable

Puget Sound lowlands and southwest interior:
– 40 mph winds with gusts to 65
– surging winds through Puget Sound area around midnight
– power outages likely
– flying debris hazard
– possibility of structural damage

Here in the normally peaceful river, we have impressive swells that are tossing all the boats about. I don’t have enough experience to know what’s really serious (although I’m obtaining it quickly this year), but everything seems OK. I’m once again prowling about the docks, checking the lines & cleats. Unfortunately, the tide is on it’s way to an 11 ft high at midnight, just about the time of the peak of the winds. If Mother Nature had been kind, we would have been sitting at a low tide and letting the storm blow over the top of the banks without disturbing us. No luck ~ we’ll be sitting high during the worst of it.

NJ and I went downstairs and snuggled (I haven’t been feeling well today, with a headache, neckache, and upset tum – the unusually pronounced rocking isn’t exactly helping either). It already sounds like a bathtub down there, with waves slapping against the sides. Should be an interesting night.

When we were showing ‘s Gehts to a very nice couple yesterday, we began chatting about where KJ had been last hauled out (Lovric’s in Anacortes – great shipyard for many reasons). Turns out that not only do they live there, but they had seen KJ being hauled out. Somehow the conversation got to One-Eye (we had named her the Demon Seal, but obviously she’s unmistakeable), the extremely social harbor seal that lives in the marina there. So we exchanged email photos of this seal; theirs is below. Apparently they feed her herring all the time. What are the chances of knowing the same harbor seal? I suppose it’s a pretty small community in the liveaboard world when you get right down to it!