Dinnertime at the Homesick Restaurant

This evening, we were about to sit down to dinner when the little raccoon mom with her even littler raccoon child showed up for their dinner.  We were having chicken soup with kale and other yard-grown vegetables.  The raccoons were having plums and apples and blueberries and water.  Zoe the cat looked at them and looked at us and decided to throw in her lot for dinner with us.  She had tunafish, though.

Under the plum tree.

Westshore Terminal

It's just up the road from us in Point Roberts and many residents here only now about coal dust.  In the summer, the Terminal conducts tours for visitors.  About an hour long.  You see a short video and then ride around the terminal area (not all that big, really) and find out what they do.

Ed and I made reservations and took the tour a couple of weeks ago (they're finished doing this for the year now).  But i really recommend you're trying to remember next summer to get signed up.  Despite living very much IN the world, I am always surprised to find that I know almost nothing about how anything really works.  How trash gets collected and disposed of, how paint is made, what they are doing at all those places down on Mitchell Island.  When I was a kid, we used to go on a tour of a bakery every year.  That's pretty much my entire background on industry.  I'd like to go on a tour of a bakery now!  My guess is that they have changed over the last 70 years.

Anyway, everything they told me was news.  I didn't know that Westshore Terminal was an entirely different operation from the container terminal.  Or that the coal didn't come there in railway cars and get immediately transferred into ships somehow.  Or that they are shipping two different kinds of coal: metallurgic coal from Canada and thermal coal from the U.S.  There are giant piles of coal all over the place and giant machines moving it around.

[A very big machine and some very fine coal.]

Growing up, my family had a coal stove.  Originally, a small one that you put lumps of coal in.  Later a coal furnace that had what was called 'slack coal' and was more pebbly.  Neither of the things they're shipping look like those.  All very interesting.  They showed us what they're doing to try to reduce coal dust.  But they understand it's a problem.

Go and learn something next summer when you have a chance.

Losing Trees

Sorry to hear that 20 acres in the Mill-Johnson area are soon to be clear-logged. [update: south of Johnson, east of Mill] I would guess that most people here are fond of the Point's rural quality, especially illustrated by its trees and its small-ish houses almost randomly distributed about our almost 5 square miles.  So, while the Character Plan Committee is fussing about gas station signs*, we lose trees, mega-houses get constructed, radio towers are scheduled to be inserted*** (by the FCC, in this case, not by the county).  One can only hope that the Character Plan Revision Committee is looking to focus on the things we actually care about.**

*In its defense, that is the task of the Character Plan Committee, so the members can't really be criticized for focusing on what they're told to focus on.  However, some cups don't need to be drunk, even if that doesn't permit you to drink some other cups that aren't on offer.

**If you long to read the Character Plan, there is a copy of it here
This link takes you to the Friends of the Library webpage and on the right side toward the bottom, click on 'other reference documents' and then, on the left column, click on Character Plan.  It's a pdf file so it takes a bit to come up.

***Surely being appropriately and admirably responded to by the community via the Stop the Towers group.

Quilt Show

I had a big quilt show last week in order to raise some money for the new library.  I can't figure out how to cross post between blogs without reentering everything, so i'm just linking to the quilt blog where I describe the event: click here!

A Fine Summer for Sunflowers

I've planted tall sunflowers for the past four or five summers and have had no such success as this year.


 They're in full sun in my neighbor's field and that probably accounts for some of their improved status.


  We have very little space with full sun in our yard, but I once had 2 plants that grew really well.  This year I have fourteen plants in the field that are doing wonderfully and just now starting to open up to their flowers; and another 5 in the semi-sun of my yard that are pretty tall but not budded yet.

In any case, although the flowers are not enormously gigantic, the stalks themselves are record making in my view.  Easily 11 feet tall.  That's 8 kale plants at the bottom right.  Not record-making, I'm afraid.

Las Vegas?

 Update, below.  And where in Las Vegas would you find this gorgeous electric orange palm tree?  Oh, right, you wouldn't find it in Las Vegas, you would find it in Point Roberts, down at the Marina, looking out over the great fields and the Strait of Georgia.

I've only seen it during the day, so I do not know whether it is actually lighted from within, but if it is, I imagine the Character Plan Committee is having some kind of conniption, if they can spare the time from connipting over a 22-foot electric sign at the Valero gas station on Gulf. across from the post office.

Everything's getting up to date in Point Roberts, I guess; we've gone about as far as an exclave ought to go.  It seems very funny to me, this palm tree.  If there were a grove of them, maybe not so good, but one lonely orange palm tree?  Almost as good as a lighthouse.  In fact, maybe it could be at Lighthouse Park; or maybe it could actually be the lighthouse?

Update:  A friend with middle eastern travel experience reports that this is exactly the kind of object you would see in Dubai.  So maybe we could think of allying ourselves to the Emirates:  We don't have any oil, of course, but we do have lots of gas (stations)....

Also, I am told that this palm tree is 'temporary'...so that it wouldn't come before the Character Plan Committee.  I wonder what constitutes 'temporary'....Could the Valero station request a 'temporary' 25 foot sign?

Well, at Least Tenuously Together

You go out into the world, you learn something.  Today, I crossed the border to obtain Okenagan peaches and nectarines and returned to find, at the U.S. side of the border, a large sign announcing that the burn ban was on.  Which is a good thing to announce to people coming down who might not otherwise know.

The sign was brought to us by the P.R. Fire District, which is certainly who should be bringing this information to our attention, but it was accompanied by something new.  After the burn-ban and the PR Fire District information, it said:

"Point Roberts.  Together in Unity."

I guess we've got a new motto, although it seems much more aspirational than descriptive.  My own experience at the Point would suggest a more modest kind of motto:  "Doing the Best We Can with What We Have," maybe.  Or, perhaps,  "At Odds and Planning to Stay That Way."  "Tenuously Together on Occasion" might capture it best.