What the heck, we made a deck!

Before: the empty, rather shady east side of our house. Plenty of flagstones but not much in the way of a wooden decked structure, I hear you say? Let's fix that!
It rained all day, of course. Ted was invaluable, providing a variety of dangerous power tools, an architect-quality plan and endless good advice, some of which we actually listened to.
Here we are at work, completely natural and unstaged. Ann took the photo and provided a hearty lunch for the workers. Note my Mariners baseball cap. I am slowly succumbing, I'm afraid.
The final structure, which was finished today. About 10 hours work in all, five boxes of screws, many feet of lumber and no lost digits. We're feeling quite proud, as a matter of fact.
Here's Karen enjoying some wi-fi internet browing, a cup of tea and some biscuits that one of our neighbours made for us. Delicious!

Mark's 2-day tour of duty in 'Iraq'

So here's my 'UN' vehicle in which I arrived in 'Iraq' - actually the US Army's training simulation in Fort Irwin, California. I was there on assigment for the Sunday Times. It's a crazy place - a facsimile Iraq town called Medina Wasl (they actually have 13 villages, including several 'Afghanistani' villages with real caves, and probably an Iranian and Russian one they didn't show us!).
Watch where you're pointing that! One of the weird things about Medina Wasl is that real Iraqis role-play Iraqi insurgnets - this guys is made up for a medical exercise about to take place. Many of the Iraqis used to work as translators for the Americans, and had to be expatriated.
Bizarrely, there are many Americans there too - just dressed up in Iraqi costume and wandering through the streets, mosques, markets and shops to add local colours. Many of the buildings are old shipping containers or even sheds!
Best of friends. A real US soldier dressed up with a nasty chest wound, and another 'insurgent'
Here's where I stayed while I was 'embedded' - an unexpectedly green eco-building with solar panels and wind turbines. The base was pretty dull (and the food was awful!) but the other journos were pretty cool.

Stuff arrives from the UK...

North 44th Street had a rude awakening Monday morning as our entire shipping container arrived on a full-fat 16-wheeler truck. It took about 20 minutes to get it around the parked cars - by the way, that's our new biodiesel '82 Merc in the foreground - we call it Chip Shop because you can smell it coming....

Boxes. 173 of them. Scary. Glad we have a basement and a garage.

Unboxing and unwrapping took many hours. Now we have to decide what stays, what gets given away and what gets re-boxed and put in the basement to give away later.

Our bedroom - we're trying to keep one room clear and sane so we don't go box crazy. More pix soon - we've got a sofa arriving today and also a vacuum cleaner, we hope. It's rather dusty...

Moving day...

Yes, that's a forced grin. We moved in on Friday afternoon with camping chairs, a mattress borrowed from Raleigh, cooking equipment from Ann and salads from QFC. So much to do! So we had a beer on the porch.

More sitting down, in between cleaning stuff, putting in/taking out screws and trying to find the water meter.

Through the locks

Last Thursday, we took Ulithi through the locks from Bell Harbour to Laurelhurst.


A bit of a late start as we enjoyed oysters and beer beforehand but a really lovely evening motoring round Magnolia, through Ballard locks and under the bridges. Then a fun cycle ride home.

Kurt and Ginger at Harstene

Kurt and Ginger came down on Sunday - hurrah! We spent the rest of the weekend mucking about on the water, playing Scrabble and drinking wine. Kurt also got a cool new tattoo from the rope swing.Note to Hartstene visitors: the red boat is rather unstable.


Another great shot from Kurt - how cool do Karen and Ginger look?


A sunset cruise around Squaxin in Ted's 'yacht' was just the way to end a perfect day....

More Hartstene fun...

We went down on last Friday evening and stayed all weekend - it was the long Labor Day holiday. First job was splitting and stacking wood for Ted's woodshed. By the time we finished, I think he had enough to last him for another two or three years - and there was still a pick-up full of logs left!
Next job was building the platform and decking for our outdoor old-school hot tub. Yes, that's me with a power tool - and yes, the deck is still standing... as you can see here.....


Here's Karen christening the tub. It really is a luxurious and decadent treat - I predict it will become a 'must' for winter trips to the island. (Note the curly toes!).