Back without a single puffin sighting
But here's a whale. Either a minkie or a fin back. I don't know. I'd call it "bigger than our boat."
My friends Paul and Sonya treated me and their kids (Salynda - 9; Anna - 5; Alexander -3 , and Miriam - 6-months) to the whale watching trip the day after I was baptized (Hey! Watch the jokes!) and we had a great time. There were quite a few whale sightings, but this is the only one I bothered shooting. I was too busy just basking in the sun, enjoying the swells, and watching my friend's kids see animals and parts of this planet they only imagined just hours before. The biggest excitement was generated when we chased a pod of 6 dolphins. Well, if you ask the 6-month old (and she was capable of replying), the most exciting thing was the squadron of seagulls that followed us to shore in the thermals and roiled air created in the boat's wake.
That's Alex pictured left enjoying the trip out of the harbor. He liked hanging on the rail so much that I kept asking him if he was bait and I started calling him my 'chum.' The girls were pretty impressed with the actual sightings, but as things usually go on trips such as this we did more cruising than watching. Just about anything would have been fine with me as I wasn't at work and wouldn't be for another 10 or so days.All-in-all it was a nice change of pace. A few things found themselves fixed around my mom's house: a sticking screen door, a recalcitrant curtain, a basement floor in need of a bad paint job, and some other items on a small "honey-do" list. I fought a cold for a few days and suffered back aches because a 42-year old should know to stretch out before getting physical with a paint roller. Mom had a 6-hour visit to the emergency room yesterday because some kidney stones felt they weren't getting enough attention, but even that wasn't overly dramatic. The whole upshot of that was that I couldn't cobble together a headboard so that gets moved up to number one on the hit parade for next visit.
Now that I've caught up on the comics (like Get Fuzzy) published while I was gone and I've put in a blog post I'm off to unpack a bit and find out where my neighbor disappeared to while I was gone. Maybe later I'll get to posting some baptism pics.
