Angela, describing her day: “I got a lot of stuff done for me, but I didn’t get any work done.” Bree: “Sounds like you had a great day.”
Many years ago, we got Nexus cards for everyone in the family so that we could quickly cross the U.S./Canada border every time we went skiing at Big White. A few years ago those cards were set to expire, so we went through the trouble of renewing them. We no longer go to Canada every year, but the cards also come with other benefits like TSA Pre-Check and Global Entry.
Evan and Liya’s Nexus cards were renewed without trouble, but the Homeland Security Department indicated that Bree had to show up for an “interview”. This is nothing more than having a new photo and fingerprints taken, but unfortunately the interviews now have to be conducted at an office in the border town of Blaine, WA — which is pretty far from us. We were still prepared to make the drive — and then covid hit and all interviews were cancelled. Homeland Security didn’t resume Nexus interviews for a long time, and we figured we would never get around to renewing Bree’s card.
Recently we received a notice saying Bree’s card had been approved. Our best guess is that they had a huge backlog of interviews, and just decided to clear out the backlog by reprinting new cards with the old photos.
We open the envelope that contains Bree’s new card and burst out laughing. The card has a photo of her from when she was maybe three years old. On top of that, the new card is good until she turns 19 years old, at which point it’d probably be pretty hard for a border agent to determine whether the young girl on the card is the same person as the woman standing in front of them.
Jan does a day hike with his friend Will to East Peak on Rattlesnake Mountain. Will’s training for a backpacking trip in a couple of weeks, and Jan’s continuing to train for his long Japan hike that will start in July.
As expected, the beautiful weather has brought tons of people to the already popular trailhead. The first two miles to Rattlesnake Ledge are non-stop people, but after snapping pictures as the scenic ledge, the trail traffic drops to nearly nothing. Nevertheless, when Jan and Will arrive at the little bench at the East Peak viewpoint, there’s already a pair of hikers sitting there. Jan and Will make do with a lesser viewpoint for lunch.
After finishing the hike, they go back to our house so that Jan can give Will a gear shakedown and outfit him with some gear like an ultralight tent.
Liya’s been coughing since she returned from Yale last month. This morning she waits for hours at a clinic to eventually receive a diagnosis of bronchitis.
Our neighbor, Christiana, tells us news from the family that lives on the other side of her back fence. It seems that our cat, Moxie, sometimes visits that family in the evening and spends the night in their house. That’s something of a relief; we’ve wondered where he goes when he gets stuck outside all night. But we’re also a little sad — we all wail, “Moxie’s cheating on us!”
Jan has been doing long urban walks on Sunday mornings in preparation for his big summer hike next month in Japan. This morning he makes a big loop over the I-90 floating bridge to Bellevue, then back across the 520 bridge. As he’s walking back through a quiet section of the Arboretum, he hears a strange “Nyak, Nyak, Nyak!” cry coming up fast behind him. He whirls around to see — Liya. Liya is coming back from a bike ride to the University of Washington campus.
Evan finishes his sophomore year at Stanford and returns to Seattle for a week and a half.
Liya and her good friend Radha do a nice day hike to Wallace Falls.
Liya starts a summer internship at a genetics lab at the University of Washington. The lab, part of the Department of Genome Sciences, works with yeast as a model organism for genetic evolution: yeasts are easy to take care of and work with, and their rapid lifecycle makes it easier to observe evolutionary processes in action. Liya will be subjecting generations of yeasts to cycles of extreme cold to see how they adapt to the environmental pressure.
Jan and Bree Backpacking Trip to Toleak Point, Day One. It’s been 2 years since Jan and Bree have done a backpacking trip together, and the last one was with a friend of Bree’s and the friend’s dad — making this the first time in 5 years they’ve been able to do a real father-daughter trip. They’re heading back to Toleak Point, a favorite spot of our family’s on the wild coast of Olympic National Park. This will be their fourth time visiting the spot.
When they stop in Port Angeles for lunch, Bree looks up food options and they end up at the town’s working waterfront. They finally decide on the Silver Lining Cafe, which makes a pretty good Philly cheese steak.
After lunch, Bree takes over the driving. She’s got less than 15 hours of practice driving left to complete before she’ll be able to take the test for her driver’s license, and this trip affords the chance for some extended driving. She pulls onto the highway. Five minutes later, she needs to merge into the next lane and doesn’t see a car — it honks loudly in complaint. A short while later, she reaches the twisty road that hugs the shore of Lake Crescent. By the time the car reaches the Third Beach Trailhead an hour and half later, her shoulders are completely tight with tension.
It’s sunny as the pair get out of the car and take out their packs. Bree discovers that she’s forgotten her hiking poles, her water bottle with a filter, and her toilet kit. They can make do with Jan’s gear, so they head out — after Jan makes a note to give Bree a checklist next time.
The mile of temperate rainforest they hike through to get to the beach is as lush as always. They eventually begin to hear the sounds of the surf, which will be ever-present for the next two days. They hike through a giant pile of logs to reach the beach and begin hiking south.
Since it’s the middle of the week, there are few other hikers. There are two very steep headlands to climb over, one of which has had extensive work done to it to make it slightly easier to climb. In the middle of one headland, they startle a pair of small snakes lying in the middle of the trail.
Jan and Bree reach Toleak Point just before 5:00 pm. Only a couple of campsites are occupied, so they walk through the open ones to make their choice. As it turns out, one of the open sites is a large one we’d used the one time we went backpacking as a family back in 2018. The park service has cleared out a lot of the decorations and other things campers had constructed from beach flotsam, including the big wooden swing we’d improved on our previous trip. But there’s a number of logs arranged around a firepit, with an unexpected bonus of a board someone’s fitted between two trees to serve as a kind of kitchen counter. Someone’s also constructed a sign facing the beach that reads, “Welcome to Ultra Chill Lounge 600”.
After setting up the tent, Jan and Bree walk around the point to Jackson Creek to get water for dinner, then hang out for a bit. While Bree reads in the tent, Jan reads on the beach. A deer walks by looking for handouts. Jan prepares a dinner of curry udon with chicken and bok choy, and later they spot some seals in the ocean.
The air temperature isn’t particularly cold, but there’s a steady wind that makes everything feel cold. They decide to start a fire, and collect armloads of small driftwood nuggets as fuel. There are toasted marshmallows to be had. When the sun goes down, it provides a dramatic backlight behind one of the many tall rocky sea stacks in the bay.
Jan and Bree Backpacking, Day Two. The coast of Olympic National Park is home to countless eagles, so Jan and Bree can hear them as they’re getting ready for the day. Jan makes blueberry pancakes, then the two make a morning hike further south along the beach to the next headland. There’s a creek in the middle of the headland whose modest waterfall makes a convenient destination and rest stop for snacks.
Back at the campsite, they have lunch and then take a nap. Jan’s interested in taking a camp-style sponge bath, but it’s a little too windy to be comfortable. While Bree reads in the tent, he uses a tarp to rig up a windbreak as a shower stall. He and Bree take turns using this, and it makes enough of a difference to provide for a reasonably comfortable shower.
They build a fire to sit around for the evening. Tonight’s dinner is the pair’s favorite: a rehydrated pasta bolognese that manages to be surprisingly good for backpacker food, along with a primitive skillet bread and more toasted marshmallows. As a drink, Jan’s brought a ridiculously-named flavor of Kool-Aid that he bought for a trip with Bree years ago: it’s called “Sharkleberry Finn”. We can never figure out why some marketing executive thought this was a good name. Like all flavors of Kool-Aid, it just tastes vaguely fruity.
Jan and Bree Backpacking, Day Three. The two need to hit the trail early to reach a particular point on the beach that will be blocked through the middle of the day by high tide. The weather forecast has called for rain today. It’s not really raining yet — although there is a heavy, damp mist.
After a quick breakfast, they break camp and start heading back north. They pass a pair of seals watching them from the ocean, as well as many more eagles. With the heavy mist, the headlands are now a little muddy, which makes the steep ascents and descents trickier than usual.
As they’re about to scramble down the final headland, they see an unusually shaped something among the huge driftwood logs at the bottom. “Maybe it’s a big tree root?”, says Jan. Bree’s the first to reach the bottom. “Not a root,” she announces. It’s a giant dead whale. It wasn’t here two days ago, so the tide must have just brought it in. The whale carcass is still complete, and thankfully hasn’t starting rotting yet, but this whole area will smell something fierce through the summer.
They make it back to the trailhead around 11:00 am. Since Bree’s feeling a little tired, she foregoes the opportunity to get in more driving practice and leaves the driving to Jan. On the way back, they make a stop at the charming, rustic Lake Crescent Lodge for lunch. Google suggests taking the Kingston–Edmonds ferry back across the sound, and when they pull into the parking lot, there are 20 lanes of cars in front of them. Somehow all those cars fit into the small ferry, and Jan and Bree both cheer when a ferry employee directs them on to the ferry.
Evan leaves to spend the summer working in Mexico City. He’ll assist a research group that includes some Stanford professors who are looking at water usage in the city. Evan is looking forward to sharing an apartment with a good friend from Stanford.
Liya is enjoying her internship studying yeast evolution at the University of Washington. She’s biking to and from the lab. When she comes back through the front door in the late afternoon, she’s happy to talk with Jan about all the interesting things that happened in the lab today.
Later Jan heads to the market to buy food, and notices Liya’s bike is still in the driveway. She’d been so interested in sharing her lab experiences that she forgot to bring her bike inside.
“I can’t find my other ear,” says Bree.
Jan pauses. “There are just so many weird things going on in that sentence.”
Bree is hard at work on a new cosplay for the Anime Expo she’ll attend in week. She’s creating a costume for Link, the hero of the Legend of Zelda video game series. Link’s an elf, so he has elf ears. Bree’s purchased and painted a pair of elf ears to wear for the cosplay — but at the moment can only find one of the ears.
Jan and Angela attend an evening woodworking class focusing on using a lathe. We’ve been looking for new activities we can do together, and thought we’d try woodworking. Angela’s taken several woodworking classes before, but tonight is the first time Jan enters a wood shop since… 8th grade or something?
We both turn pieces of walnut wood on the lathe to shape, sand, and polish them to create handles. Angela’s handle becomes part of an ice cream scoop; Jan’s is a pizza cutter. The pizza cutter is highly unlikely to see any use (the places we order from already cut pizzas just fine), but the ice cream scoop will probably see heavy action this summer.
Bree’s getting down to the wire on her Link cosplay for Anime Expo. She leaves in just two days, but is only now tackling the hardest part of her outfit: trying to attach a strip of green LEDs to an elaborate glove she’ll wear as Link’s right hand.
The LEDs come in a strip that can, in theory, bend around corners. However, quick experimentation proves that bending ultimately breaks the connections. This means Bree must carefully solder together connections at the many points where the LED strip needs to turn a corner to fit the glove design. A friend has given Bree a spare soldering iron for this task, but Bree’s only soldered once before, and that was a few years ago. She eventually gets the hang of cutting and stripping wires, then soldering them onto the LEDs strip sections.
Unfortunately, even the soldered connections are too fragile for a wearable device — whenever she tried on the work in progress, some connection somewhere breaks and needs to be repaired. She ultimately decides that the LEDs are a bridge too far for this convention, and wisely falls back to simply painting the channels where the LEDs would have gone.
Bree heads to Los Angeles with her friend, Marina, to attend Anime Expo. Both girls have spent a big chunk of their summer vacation so far getting new cosplays ready for the convention. They both bring large boxes packed with clothing and accessories for their outfits. Bree spent a long time whittling her large box down so that it just barely avoids counting as oversize luggage.
Angela’s brother, Johnny, is graciously hosting them for the long weekend, and has also volunteered to chaperone them at the convention. Bree’s cousin, Brian, will also join them for part of the convention.
Marina and Bree on a walk in Rancho Palos Verdes, where Johnny and Jenny live.