Drama

Today our first house guest arrives. She is a lady we met in Victoria, BC a couple of years ago. She is a Quaker and attends meetings of leaders of that faith. She is on her way home but has a one day stop over in Bellingham between trains. So we offered that she spend the night here. Her train gets in in two hours. She wants to see some of my paintings and we plan to take her to the Bellwether while she is here. She tried once to see some of my paintings during a visit while I was away at Art Camp. The paintings were at a bakery, only they were not there when she visited. Without telling me, the bakery owner had taken the paintings down. They were parked in one of their store rooms. When I found out via this lady's email that they were gone, I contacted the bakery and found out what had happened. Arvin and my brother Steve retrieved the paintings and I have not been back to that bakery since!

Tomorrow the visitor's train takes off at nine in the morning. At 5:30 our next visitor arrives. This is the new leader of the Dutch students' program that takes place at Whatcom Community College. For seven years we hosted the leader, Ian, who became our close friend. He and Steve are like brothers and we really miss Ian. He has been given another assignment and Rachel is taking his place. At first we were not planning to host her, but Ian asked if we would, and so we are. From our emails so far, I think we are going to like her.

So it will be busy times around here for the next three weeks. And today is the beginning.

I spent the morning on the deck taking all kinds of photos and gently encouraging the seagulls to get away from the dog food so the crows could have some. I think the crows may have gotten the message. (They are really smart.) They came around and ate quite a bit of the food while the seagulls were off the deck. Yay crows! After much thought I decided to blip this photo of the clouds over the hills on the other side of the lake. Press "L" for the large version. By the way, you can see one of the seagulls flying off against the lower area of this photo.