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July 2, 2004

IT'S FRIDAY!! NOT ONLY IS IT MY FAVORITE DAY, IT'S MY BIRTHDAY TOO!!

AAAGH!! My webmaster left the pictures down at the coast when he came to West Linn to post this week's Journal. So no pics yet, but he promises to have them before the week is out. Of course, he also promised them on time on Friday too, so we'll see!!

On Sunday, we packed up most of our stuff and brought another load down to the coast. Now, we are definitely here. We have one more load of big stuff to move this Saturday, bedroom furniture, washer and dryer and Dave's office but the kids will help us with that this weekend.

We have spent most of this week down at Wheeler - working. Our good friends Des and Donna, who live down the river a ways, told us how you spell Wheeler - W-O-R-K! I am beginning to believe them. We have been getting the Captain Bell ready for the 4th of July parade in Manzanita and this has taken much of our time this week. Since I am the second mate, one of my jobs is to polish the brass lanterns and steam whistle. I also wash the deck plating, canopy and hull. I am discovering muscles that I never knew about and Flexall 454 and Tylenol have become my close, personal friends! One thing that makes us feel good about this is that Dave's Mom was so adamant about having the boat sparkling clean and we know that she is smiling down on us for all our efforts.

When I haven't been cleaning the boat, I have been weeding. That is a never-ending job around here! The place has been neglected for about five years and the blackberries and ivy have taken over. In fact, I had to get help figuring out what were attractive weeds and what are actually real flowers. I asked Deanna Brinkman from the Garden Club to come down and help me identify what was what. She was a big help and I got a lot of bad stuff ripped out. Deanna had worked with Lillian around the place and actually helped plant a lot of the stuff, so she was the person to ask!

We thought we had discovered most of the areas around Wheeler, but found an undiscovered one the other night, which is invisible from our house. After dinner with Des and Donna we hopped in their boat and took this real neat excursion down this passageway between these two islands right in front of our house. It is only accessible during high tide and real narrow with high grass on both sides. Both Donna and I thought that we were going to have to get out and push as we didn't know how deep the water was, but we kept going until we couldn't go any further. I felt like we were in the African Queen movie. We saw so many birds and wildlife on our trip.

Out of the mouth of babes! My daughter was telling me about my 2-1/2 year old granddaughter, Paige. She hasn't seen the need to develop her conversational skills; she lets her big sister do most of the talking. The family was discussing where they were going to have Father's day dinner. Paige kept saying something about where she wanted to go and Leslie was half-heartedly listening to her as they continued their conversation. After about the third "Okay, Paige"; Paige had finally had enough and said "H E L L O!!" Boy, that got everyone's attention!

Plans for this week: Back to West Linn on Friday, move the heavy stuff back to Wheeler on Saturday, put the boat in the parade on Sunday, and hopefully launch it right after that. Monday and Tuesday will be more of the same - working around the place and maybe doing a little steaming in the boat. Dave has to announce races in Portland Wednesday night, so we'll be back there for that and a haircut Thursday morning, and then it's right back down here again. Hopefully for a week this time. We don't get our DSL installed in Wheeler until July 12th, so posting this next Friday may be a challenge on the dial-up line, but I'll try. Also, we received the software to get the webcam up and running again, but we can't open the program! Another challenge! So the webcam may be down for a while.

GIVE ME A BREAK!!