beach is slowly returning...

 met up with michelle from work at the beach with the dogs.  rio stayed home.  figure the slushy snow and mucky mud/sand could be tough on her joints.  it's that time of year...break up.  gotta think about where i walk blossom too as the lakes and stuff will be thawing and i don't want her to go through the ice.  as you can see she just got very muddy/sandy today.  safe though.

 didn't do to much camera work today. the beach is cleared of much ice though.  dogs are always good subjects.  this is one of michelles dogs above.  such an adorable face!!

 besides my beach trek and a few errands and household chores i was pretty lazy today.  got sucked into a good book and have now started a second good book.  sometimes you just need to disappear into a book for a few days.  the one i finished was called, " the snow child" by a local writer eowyn ivey.  it is set in alaska, homesteaders back when alaska was a territory and not a state.  she incorporates a russion folk tale into her story and brings it to life.  an interesting book and one that you don't wish to put down.  the ending did disappoint a bit.  i hate when they leave things hanging rather than clear it up.  oh well.

 now i just started another book by an alaskan.  "beyond the bear" by dan bigley and debra mckinney.  several years back now bigley was brutally attacked by a brown bear and this is the story of that attack and the recovery from it.  he was cared for in my hospital and unit.  i had just switched from the adult icu to the peds icu at the time and it was before i started going back and forth between the two units.  so we never met.

 the attack left him blind.  just realized one of these days he could be highlighted on my new favorite web site, tedtalks.com.  that would be cool.  they highlighted the book in the anchorage daily news one day so i wanted to check it out. not too many people get attacked by bears thankfully as it would be terrifying.  lena and i were just discussing attack by bear vs moose.  we both would prefer moose.  they don't chomp down on you and rip you to bits.

 michelle walked out a bit before i called her back...the mud can suck you in.  i've been sucked into it before out at china poot.  easy to get stuck.  people do walk across to fire island from time to time, but it's not on my bucket list.  anything goes wrong you are screwed.  the tides rush in fast and furious and if you are stuck in the mud...you can forget about it, as they say.

 still quite a bit of ice sheets out there and chunks of ice further out, but it was the first time in awhile that i could walk on the "beach" as it were.

 sunset looks like it will be pretty out there, but i'm ready to curl up with a movie or read more tonight.  slated for a haircut tomorrow.  i like shorter hair that i can actually do something with, but it's also annoying as i have to keep going in to get it trimmed.  it grows fast.

 my brother joel called and he's thinking of joining tom and his family up here this summer for part of their trip anyway and he mentioned another brother is also thinking of joining.  could get crowded, but could be fun too.  i did tell him that i rarely get surprise visitors up here.  i generally have some advance warning of who all is actually showing up.

 dirty, happy dogs.

 there was a big puddle on the way back up to the cars and blossom sank down in that and got some of hte mud/sand off.  not that she couldn't use a good bath still. not much point at this time of year.  she will be dropping into every tiny puddle she can find until it freezes again.  i still do like to try and give her a real bath sometime at the end of spring and again in fall.  the car should get that too.

 my back deck is nearly cleared of all the ice.  it's melting fast all over town.  there has been some talk that there could be some issues across the state with flooding due to the late snows and rapid melt.  we shall see.

blossom seemed to leap up this hill 20x faster than i did...of course once up there she dropped her tennis ball and it rolled all the way to the beach.  i was too lazy to go all the way back down to retrieve it and was unable to direct blossom as to where it was.  so another tennis ball sacrifice to the god of oceans.  i can assure you it was no virgin tennis ball..!!it was a fancy squeaky one, but the squeaker was weak at best and the skin was starting to peel away.  blossom mourned her loss still.  she becomes quite attached to her tennis balls.
back to work tomorrow night so it will be a few days...