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Sam and I left Seattle behind today on a wander in Carkeek park.

We discovered a wonderful log-jammed stream, waded into an alternate universe…

…followed the silty sun-dappled water way down to the joy of triple culverts-

-emerged from the dark wet tunnels into the bright sunshine beach world full of stinky muck and glittering streams. Sam wandered off to discover the mysterious origins and ends of all creeks and I set off along the railroad embankment to find a spot o’ sandy goodness.

We rendevoused for a rock climb and Sam created strategic battle terrains whilst I coaxed a rhinoceragon out from the sand(they’re quite shy, when not terrorizing tourists).

Yay summer! More pics here.

Sam demonstrates his awesome wierd face skilz as we celebrate summer(and our innate silliness) on a gorgeous sunny afternoon at the beach.

Gawd, I love the sumptuous summer days..

..and my sweet, sweet boy.

I had a fabulous tween weekend.

Sam and I missed Rowan’s birthday last week, so we celebrated(and said goodbye to her for the summer) by having an all weekend campout in the backyard.

Thanks to Jim’s palatial tent, we all had our own rooms too-perfect for privacy and connection, teleportation optional, but highly recommended.

It was blazing hot, so we filled the hot tub with cold water and the kids tested their Popsicle Samurai endurance skilz.

What a full weekend! We went to WALL-E(good movie that), took the Bday girl manga shopping, tromped around town in search of desserts… There was marshmallow-roasty bonfires, late-nite manga madness, stormy gusts blustering the tent, giggly morning conversations about god, the universe and everything and a lovely trip to the Dobyn’s trampoline.

Where Rowan trounced us all with the sheer power of HAIR.

M’kehla chopped hers off halfway through the weekend, to emerge looking all cute and shorn and elegant. Fortunately, Rowan has enough hair for all of ‘em and then some.

And, apparently(according to Sam) it has rejuvenative powers. It wouldn’t surprise me-she could put the fear of hair unto a horde of rastafarians.

More campin’, trampin’ and hair power here.

Sam’s favorite feature of Rita and Ben’s house is the ginormous trampoline in the backyard. Usually he can persuade Rita to sproing about with him for hours, but neither of us were feeling very bouncy after so much partying and parade-wading, so we spectated as he put on a Boingplop show. Boing!

Plop. Down he’d come, with lots of cool ninja moments inbetween.

We got some wacky pics(flickr’d of course).

Master of strange faces vs. teh trampoline.

I think the trampoline won.

My dear friend Rita had an awesome birthday bash on friday. Ben’s deluxe homemade sourdough pizza, tons of other delicious foody goodness, great conversations, high-flying trampoline madness, musical mayhem, repeated attempts to get Ben’s pants off, spanking lessons, much massage goodness(including lessons on nape-biting, one of my favorite non-professional techniques), and snuggle puddle heaven ensued.

Ah, birthday delights.

We partied into the wee hours and then many of us crashed overnight with intentions to attend the Fremont Solstice Parade in the morning sans the madness of fair-goer traffic congestion and parking.

I will give the parade it’s own separate post, but this

was on our walk home to Rita and Ben’s house. There’s a very steep Monetesque(huh, -esquing doesn’t work as well with those silly french silent consonants) sidewalk that Sam likes to march up, so they stalked me all the way up.

The madfunny stalking progression here.

Had an exsqueezeite visit with Delayne earlier this week. He popped in to attend my show and stayed to help me celebrate and decompress(and finish up all the chocolate and cherries *mmmmmmm*…) for a few days.

Aaaaah, such glorious good times.

Sam and I took him to Discovery Park’s delicious north beach-land of lovely beach snags, driftwood logs perfect for scrambling across, clay cliffs(just the thing for an explosion-minded lad, like my Sam), flotsam(including several interesting dead creatures), insanely hoppy bugs and lots and lots of excellent stackable stones.

D is an expert of stackology-or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the man is deeply attuned to rocks of all sorts(this astonishing affinity is also evidenced by his luscious stone sculptures) and Sam and I were amazed and delighted by the delicate, precarious balancing acts he coaxed his rocks into performing.

Even more fun when we turned about(quite abruptly, when D rather nonchalantly sounded the ‘wonder if our packs have drowned yet?’ alarm) and saw the tide had come in and made the stone towers into islands-and soaked one of our packs!

Fortunately, it didn’t drench the one with the camera and all in all, it was a wonderful day.

More pretty rocks and log scrambling here.

I
spy
a
little
eye…

It’s a bit of a long walk back from Sam’s schoolbus dropoff, but ’twas a gorgeous sunshining sort of day, so walk we did.. He even did a grand job of it, not collapsing-

-in his usual dramatic fashion until I stopped a few blocks from home to photograph a spectacularly lumpish cherry tree.

You’ll be glad to hear we made it home, despite the alien spaceship landing site cleverly disguised as a roundabout construction circle-fortunately my son is an expert at such egregious alien subterfuge and so we were able to nonchalantly circumnavigate the spurious construction and thus avoid becoming an extraterrestrial’s extra credit science project.

Phew! I can’t imagine what they’d think of the human race if they took us as typical examples!

Of course, if they were a scouting force for an invasion, perhaps it would have dissuaded them-when Sam started randomly exploding.

I love this pic-it shows off his elf ears. Not quite as pointy as when he was born, but still nice and sharp.

It’s s’posed to be spring already for God’s sake!

Got off work a little early, happy to be able to walk back to my car(I parked a zillion miles away for my walking pleasure) in the light… and got slapped chilly for my pains by the nasty sleety rains.

Sigh.

Oh well, at least I wasn’t locked out when I got home. Like yesterday. When my housemate’s main squeeze, Jim, forgot we don’t possess a key to the lower lock on the front door.

Luckily, Molly came home as Sam and I were prying the screen off of Sophie’s window and betwixt the three of us, we broke and entered. Sam did an excellent job of scrambling up Molly(no boots in the face) and popping in the window(without crashing any of Sophie’s knick knacks) and unlocking our front door(yayz!).

Jim however, is in deep, as this is NOT the first time he’s remembered to lock, but forgotten which lock NOT to lock.