Then all of a sudden — BOOM! — spring started bursting out all over the place!

Trees that were bare suddenly turned day-glow green. The big-leaf maples produced their odd green flowers, followed quickly by miniature-but-rapidly-growing big leaves.

A deer walked right through my back yard!

Wildflowers began to bloom. Here’s a trillium just getting started, rising out of a carpet of moss.

We discovered a new (to us) trail. The trailhead is less than a mile from my house — we can walk to the trailhead! The trail follows a stream, meandering into the National Park and through low-elevation second-growth forest. Scenes like this beckon to us… wouldn’t you love to duck under the fallen log and up those steps that disappear around the corner? We’ll walk this trail frequently this summer, I think. It sure beats doing a lap of the neighborhood streets!

If we needed any more proof that summer is on its way, we got it the other day when a small (100-passenger) cruise ship pulled into City Pier for a two-day stay. This boutique cruise line has committed to doing a total of 13 Puget Sound cruises with port calls in our town in May, September, and October. The tourist season is upon us!

Today is May 1, and the sun will set at 8:27 PM. In another day or two I’ll notice the morning and afternoon sun coming through my north-facing windows. By the time we reach the solstice, sunset will be well after 9:00 PM and the last of the light will fade to the northwest at 10:00 PM.

This weekend the forecast calls — finally — for high temperatures over 70. Woohoo! Break out the shorts and tank tops, summer is actually coming!

Reblogged from Slow Happy Runner:

Is NHC a big deal? Well, there were 12 judging centers all across the country this year, and each of those 12 centers accepted 750 entries. Do the math: that’s 9,000 homebrews! Registration was filled within hours. Yes, it’s that big.

As beginning homebrewers, we volunteered to be stewards. It’s the steward’s job to bring the right beer to each judging table at the right time, to keep the tables supplied with judging forms, pencils, glasses, water, crackers… and occasionally to gratefully accept a few sips of a beer that a judge might decide is worth sharing.

According to the official style guidelines, beers are classified into 20+ styles, each of which has several sub-styles. For this competition each style had its own “queue” (or several queues for popular styles like IPA). Each steward was responsible for coordinating all the beers within his or her queue.

We volunteered for the Saturday afternoon session, which was the third of three judging sessions in Seattle. The event was held at the Pyramid Brewery in downtown Seattle, within walking distance of the ferry. We walked there in a gentle spring PNW downpour.

Once we’d checked in, the head steward gave us a quick briefing and then instructed us to wander through the tables and ask who needed a steward.

So we wandered. We stopped a likely looking table and asked. We got an unexpected response: “We need a steward. But what we REALLY need is someone who is willing to sit in as a novice judge.”

It took me (LKS) a couple of nanoseconds to respond: “I would LOVE to! Which style are you judging?”

The answer: strong ales — a style I have actually BREWED! Strong ales are amped-up English-style ales. The three sub-styles are Old Ale (of which Slow Happy Brewing’s “Grand Festivus XII” is an example), English Barleywine (our “Ides of Festivus XIII”) and American Barleywine (like the English version but with American hops).

So I found myself sitting down with two very experienced beer judges who walked me through each step of the process, asked me what I was smelling and tasting, validated my perceptions, and encouraged me to put them in writing on the judging form.

We judged eight Old Ales. Two were excellent, one was pretty good, three were okay and two had obviously gone bad somewhere during the process of shipping and storing.

Almost three hours passed while I experienced utter tunnel vision. I was oblivious to everything in the world but the feeling of being completely immersed in those beers. It is an amazing experience of concentration and flow.

The pours are only about three ounces, and I was probably only drinking half of each pour. It was absolutely not about consuming alcohol; rather it was completely about absorbing and seeking to understand the subtleties and intricacies of each beer.

I think I was on the fifth beer before it occurred to me to share a bit of my glass with our loyal and patient steward, my very dear CFL!

When we finished our queue of eight beers, I was elated and exhausted, but not too sated to go downstairs and enjoy a couple of pints of Pyramid’s Outburst Imperial IPA along with an excellent margarita pizza.

It was a good day!

I’ve been seriously working at cultivating my nose and my taste buds for a while now. I’ve been thinking about attempting the judge qualifying exam, but I’ve been reluctant to commit that much time to actually studying for something. By offering me a chance to try judging and coaching me through it, those two judges from the American Homebrewers Association opened a door that I could not otherwise have dreamed of going through. I’m very grateful.

I will never taste beer in quite the same way again.

And yes, I’m going to take that judge qualifying exam and make it official!

So here you go — here are some of the best whale photos from the more than 500 trip photos that we have between us. Tomorrow (or soon, anyway) I’ll write about and post photos of the birds, the camp, the region, and some of the fun things that we did while in San Diego as well.

A mother and calf approach the boat…

Seventeen seconds later per the time stamp on the photos, THIS happens!

Here you can see mom just below the surface, lifting baby out of the water so we all get a better look!

Baby rolls on its side for a better look at us…

And stays on its side for another close approach.

It’s the next day, we’re with another mother/calf pair, and this one seems to be sticking its tongue out at us! (We also saw baleen, but we don’t have any photos of that remarkable “tooth” adaptation.)

Meanwhile the rest of our group, in the other boat, were seeing some nice fluke action…

On the third morning we were out on the water with a group of local children on a school field trip.  What lucky kids! Watching them play with this baby whale was almost as good as being with the whale ourselves.

Eventually the kids moved on and we got to take our turn with this exceptionally outgoing whale. Check out this eye shot!

I was shooting video that morning. The way I was squealing, I’m not sure I want to post those videos, but as you can see I got a shot of my hand touching the whale.

By this time several people had kissed the whale and it was my turn to give it a go. I had no idea I was so far out of the boat when this sequence was taken!

From all the upraised hands in this photo, I seem to have just completed that kiss… but alas, there is no photo of that split second. In any case, I’m glad someone finally got a hand on my life jacket!

By the end of that morning’s trip, we were all totally wrung out!

It was windy out there on the water. I had put gobs of sunblock on my head, which — combined with whale spray and sculpted by wind — produced a truly stunning hair style. But I can assure you, this is a smile of pure and total joy.

I’m so grateful to CFL for his wonderful photos. It brings a new perspective to the whole experience for me… one that I’m pleased and proud to share with you.

Yet these photos, awesome as they are, can only give you an idea of what it’s really like. Life changing? Absolutely! 

Three years ago I had a truly life-changing experience. It was a trip I’d wanted to make for years. It was the first and only vacation I ever took without my late husband. We’d had many great vacations together, but his idea of a fun vacation simply didn’t include activities like flying in a small plane and camping on a remote beach. At the time I couldn’t imagine that he’d be diagnosed with cancer four months later, but I was certainly grateful that he encouraged me to take the trip without him.

My solo vacation brought me the great privilege of traveling to Laguna San Ignacio in Baja California Sur, Mexico. This is one of the few calving grounds of the Eastern Pacific Gray Whale and the only one that is still essentially pristine. There I stayed for several days at a primitive camp and enjoyed whale watching up close and personal! Some of the calves and their mothers are “friendly” — they swim right up to small boats and seem to invite touching. This behavior began in the 1970s when, for unknown reasons, some of the mother/calf pairs began approaching local fishermen. Some of those fishermen, including my host, saw an opportunity in ecotourism.

Not all the whales are friendly, but those who are seem genuinely curious and engage with boats and passengers in a playful way. I briefly tapped a couple of calves during my time there. As great as the touching is, however, the truly life-changing moment occurs when a gray whale rolls on its side and LOOKS at you — making direct eye contact from mere feet away.

I came home from that trip deeply moved, profoundly grateful, and vowing to return again someday.

Fast forward almost three years. CFL and I were talking about adventure travel — exotic places we’d like to go and things we’d like to do. He mentioned Laguna San Ignacio.

I hadn’t forgotten my vow to return! I was instantly ready to do it again.

We went with the same company as I used last time. Baja Ecotours is based in San Diego and operates in partnership with a local entrepreneur and his extended family who operate Campo Cortez at the lagoon. We (along with about half of our tour group of eleven people) actually booked our tour through a Puget Sound area whale advocacy group called Orca Network.

We all gathered in San Diego on March 4. Early the next morning we boarded a charter bus to Ensenada. There we all squeezed into a very small plane for the two and a half hour flight to Laguna San Ignacio, about halfway down the Baja California Peninsula on the west side. We landed on a dirt runway and were met by our hosts with a cooler full of ice cold beer. We then boarded an ancient school bus for the nearly ten mile trip to Campo Cortez.

Laguna San Ignacio and the surrounding region are a national park, thanks to the efforts of environmentalists and local citizens to protect it against development. In 2010 these groups successfully stopped the Mitsubishi Corporation’s plan to build the world’s largest salt works at Laguna San Ignacio, thus saving the calving grounds. The Mexican government has authorized about a dozen primitive camps and allows whale watching in small (14-16 foot) boats within a small area near the mouth of the lagoon.

According to a census taken a couple of days before our arrival, there were nearly 400 whales in the lagoon (about twice as many as were present when I was last there three years ago). About 220 were mother/calf pairs and the remainder were adult stragglers who hadn’t yet begun their northbound migration to the Arctic (mothers and calves are always the last to leave).

During our three full days in camp we were treated to twice-daily whale watching trips. The time within the whale watching area is a closely-monitored 90 minutes each trip. 

The whales wasted no time getting acquainted! As soon as we entered the whale watching area and idled the boat engine, there were whales everywhere. Everyone in our group got to touch a baby whale on our first outing. By the end of the three days, I’d touched babies on four out of our six trips. Here’s CFL getting to know a baby whale.

Usually, the moms simply hang close by while “junior” plays. Sometimes a mother will lift a baby onto her back (as if to say “look at my beautiful baby!”) and then nudge it closer to the boat. But for two of the mothers, that wasn’t enough — they wanted to be touched too! I suspect that these particular whales had been friendly when they were babies, and they were just doing what they’d always done… there could be second or even third generation “friendlies” by now.

Patting the snout of an 18-foot baby gray whale is awesome enough — but when a 40-foot mother comes to gaze into your eyes and be petted, the intensity of the experience is simply beyond words. Sadly, I have no eye photos… those moments happen so quickly.

On the morning of our last day (trip 5 of 6) we met up with a baby whale that simply could not play with us enough! Think of an enthusiastic, slightly gangly, but exceedingly playful puppy. This guy (or gal) literally came to each of us on our boat one by one and lingered for extended patting, rubbing, and scratching. He stayed so close to the boat for such a long time that I and others actually KISSED him on the snout. Meanwhile mama repeatedly swam under the boat, bumping it gently and lifting us partly out of the water. It was a wet, slightly wild, and most unforgettable ride.

Among the adults at the lagoon, we saw too many spy hops to count, multiple breaches close by the boat, and a bit of flirtatious behavior. These whales were not interested in interacting with us, but our nearby presence did not prevent them at all from going about the business of being gray whales.

That’s one of the many things I love about this place. At first it almost seems that we are imposing on their lives… maybe crowding them with our boats… maybe getting in their way. Then I watch them gracefully swimming to us, around us, under us. They know we are there. They could avoid us but they come to us. They could knock our boat right out of the water, but they rub and bump it gently. Their eyes shine with curiosity, playfulness, and intelligence. They are as entranced with us as we are with them.

It is a meeting of minds and hearts.

Their trust of us — we members of the species that hunted them almost to extinction — is a great gift.

I have other stories to tell about this trip — the camp itself, the bird life, and (of course) some great beer tourism moments while in the San Diego area. I have lots more photos to share. But this is enough for today.

I hope I have given you a taste and whet your appetite for more. If you ever get the chance… believe me, you will not be disappointed. This is a genuinely life-changing experience.

]]> http://slowhappyliving.com/2013/03/16/the-friendly-gray-whales-of-laguna-san-ignacio/feed/ 2 slowhappyliving At the Laguna San Ignacio airport Meeting a friendly gray whale at Laguna San Ignacio Mama gray whale wants some love too! At Laguna San Ignacio http://slowhappyliving.com/2013/03/14/what-on-earth-have-we-been-up-to/ http://slowhappyliving.com/2013/03/14/what-on-earth-have-we-been-up-to/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:55:05 +0000 Slow Happy Living http://slowhappyliving.com/?p=581 Continue reading →]]> We’ve been home for several days and I’m still processing. I think it’s going to take several more days and several blog posts to sort it all out. For now I’ll just say that it involved international travel and intense wildlife encounters. Oh, and some world class craft beers as well!

And yes, the activity streak is still intact.

I’ll do my best to tell you all about it soon… It’s just that I have a few hundred photos to sort through and decide what to post here… So please stay tuned!

True to our tradition, the beer required both a name and a code. We write a code on the bottle cap so that when we open it later we’ll know which beer it is. We have grand ambitions of creating labels one of these days, but for now the code works pretty well.

We had a working name of “Take 3 IPA,” and a code of “T3.” But on bottling day, CFL wanted a more descriptive code so he’d remember that this batch is an IPA and not some obscure beer style that starts with “T.” We settled on “I3″ for the code, but when he wrote it, it looked more like “13.” When I got out my batch log to change the code for my records, I made an amazing discovery! This is our 13th batch!

Well, the 13th batch of beer demanded a name celebrating that fact. I offered up a few ideas like “13th Floor” but nothing was really clicking for us. Then we thought about the trails that we know and love… the places where I run and CFL rides his bike. Those trails have mile marker signs. Our 13th batch of beer is a milestone of sorts.

Voila! Mile Marker 13 American IPA is born!

Well, actually it’s in the midst of bottle conditioning right now, but it will be born in mid-March.

Meanwhile I got to thinking about mile markers, and for the life of me I could not picture the mile marker 13 sign on the Olympic Discovery Trail. Surely the trail construction crew wouldn’t have simply skipped over that sign out of some “unlucky 13″ silliness, would they?

So yesterday I had to go out and run that section of trail to try and find mile marker 13.

I found it!

It was a good five feet off the trail and during much of the year it is probably hidden by brush, but in the dead of February it’s definitely visible. I’ll have to remember to look for it again later in the year…

The hunt for mile marker 13 was a highlight of a rather awesome long not-so-slow 11.3 mile run. This section of trail is flat and fast. Without a great deal of effort I was running at a half marathon PR pace (not counting my camera stop). I wouldn’t have had any problem continuing at that pace for another 1.8 miles and completing the half marathon distance. But unlike my past half marathons, I don’t think I’d need two weeks or more to recover afterwards. I’ll be ready to run again tomorrow.

It’s been a year now since I quit my job and declared myself post-corporate. The time I’ve been able to put into running, hiking, and walking since then has rewarded me with increased stamina and resilience, reduced stress, and a whole lot more smiling! I’m grateful that I can choose to live my life in this way… recognizing that it’s not an option for most people. Still, anyone can choose to do something — anything! — to be a bit more active every day.

Today is day 56 of CFL’s and my activity streak. I’ve logged 155 running miles and 260 total miles. I’ve seen a lot of trail mile markers along the way.

CFL has me beat on mileage, but only because he can go a bit further on his bike in a given time period than I can on foot. We’re totally non-competitive and mutually supportive — we simply make movement a priority in our day. Every day.

We go when it’s raining. We go when it’s cold and windy like today. We walk to most places we go within our small city. And when we’re finished, we relax and have a home brew!

What about you? What are you doing for exercise today? Tomorrow? What mile markers are out there waiting for you to discover?

So what’s new? Two more batches of beer! On January 30 we brewed our spring seasonal, which was supposed to be an English Barleywine but seems to want to be an Imperial IPA. I guess we’re starting to figure out how to get the most “bang” out of our hops. We’ve named this big boy, which will finish somewhere in the neighborhood of 9%, “The Ides of Festivus XIII.” We will give this beer a long aging period and debut it in mid-March.

Then on February 8 we brewed our third American IPA, and I think we finally got this one hoppy enough (see my comment above about finally figuring out how to properly nurture our hops). This batch has the working title of “Take 3,” for obvious reasons. We’ve been focused on the American IPA style recently because our homebrewers club is having an IPA contest in March, complete with a genuine, certified beer judge. Take 3 should be ready to drink by early March, so this was our do-or-die batch. We’ll enter it and see what happens.

On the exercise front, our activity streaks continue. We’re both working on increasing our daily distance (he’s on his bike, I’m running). As the days grow longer, it gets easier to find large blocks of time to get out there and go. We’re already looking closely for the first signs of spring flowers on the trails — it won’t be long now.

We have a major travel adventure planned within the next several weeks… I’ll tell you more about it as we get closer, but you won’t hear all the awesome details until after we return…

Life is good! It’s a wonderful thing to be happy and healthy. CFL and I both feel very fortunate to be able to do the things we are doing. I intend to enjoy every one of these moments as fully as I possibly can. Even if it means I don’t sit down to blog very often.

Until next time…

At the time, of course, I replied that he had a knack for filling every potential gap in our conversational space with a long, drawn-out “so, anyway…” that kept me from ever getting a word in edgewise.

That generated a most lively conversation.

Since then we’ve negotiated a few things and learned to love one another’s unique characteristics. We’ve now reached the point where we can affectionately mock one another’s habitual speech patterns and laugh together about them.

Last weekend we took a road trip down to southern Oregon to visit some family members. There were long hours in the car during which we talked about many things. Beer was a major topic. We’d planned several opportunities to visit microbreweries and sample some well-known Oregon beers. We also had upcoming batches of home brew to plan. At some point I inevitably said, “we’ll see.” Suddenly we both laughed and simultaneously exclaimed, “we’ll brew!”

Has a brewery slogan been born? We’ll see… um… we’ll brew!

As for the beer tourism… a night’s stop in Eugene allowed us to take in Ninkasi, Falling Sky, and Rogue’s Tracktown Brewery.

Ninkasi’s fermentation tanks were impressive. This photo includes a studious-looking CFL, carefully positioned in my attempt to provide scale. However, he’s standing in a large doorway so you can’t see the tops of the tanks. Oh well…

Ninkasi is well-known and features big, bold, hoppy beers with names like Total Domination IPA. We shared a flight of several 4-ounce tasters and that was plenty.

In contrast, Falling Sky is only a year old, grew out of the home brew supply store next door, caters to locals, and features relatively low-alcohol “session” beers that nicely accompany its tasty, simple pub food. We might have stayed there all evening, but the Rogue/Tracktown brewery promised good pizza so we carried on. The pizza lived up to the hype and the beer was good too. We ended the evening quite satisfied.

During our time in my family’s small town in southern Oregon I got out for a nice run along the Rogue River. Eventually this trail will connect with the one a few miles further south where I ran the Rogue Run half marathon last September. On this trip I did an easy 6 mile run and then spent the afternoon with my family, while CFL took at bit more time and ended up walking about 8 miles.

It was a good trail.

This part was even better! There was a half mile side trail that ran right along the river bank, for those who like to bound over roots and mud puddles. That would be me!

That afternoon we held a family tasting of eight of our home brews (numbers 2 through 9). The verdict: They’re all good! (Thanks guys.) We ended the day with a visit to the nearby Wild River Brewing and Pizza for — you guessed it — microbrews and pizza!

Through all of our travels and other adventures we have kept our activity streak going. We walked — in a downpour — to all those breweries in Eugene. We stopped to do two laps around a shopping mall in the midst of our 550 mile drive home. We’re now 29 days into 2013 and I’m approaching 120 running/walking miles, while CFL has a larger number of walking/biking miles. At this point our streak will not be broken for anything short of an unimaginably dire emergency. The longer we continue, the stronger is the imperative not to stop.

But you know what? It’s still one step at a time, one day at a time. This streak wasn’t envisioned as such beforehand. It’s an emergent phenomenon.

What will happen next? We’ll see.

We’ll brew!

I didn’t actually know him all that well, but in a certain sense we were close friends… because Charlie was the sort of guy who made everyone around him feel valued and valuable, loved and loving. He was a faculty member at the school where I did my PhD. We always said we’d work on something together but somehow we never did. I knew his name before I started my PhD program; he was one of the “founding fathers” of the discipline of organization development. I was speechless with awe the first time I met him ten years ago.

As I got to know him, my awe decreased while my admiration and love for him grew. How could you not love a ceaselessly smiling elderly man in a red shirt, suspenders, and a baseball cap? His humility, his perception, his empathy, his goofy sense of humor, and his obvious relish for life were all endearing and contagious. He sang and laughed with gusto. In conversation, he looked straight at you with absolute attention. He was completely, utterly present in everything that he did. He led workshops on “the use of self” in consulting, but his life practice was to simply be himself, and in so doing to make space for others to discover, become, and be themselves.

When I first described myself as a slow happy runner, it was almost as an incantation to myself. I didn’t have all that much to be happy about. Yet I was committed to running and to the idea that “slow mileage is better than no mileage,” and I knew from bitter experience that in the worst of times my running had the power to carry me through the pain.

When I met CFL the idea of slow happy living inspired both of us as a vision of a way of life. We’d both hit unanticipated bumps in our lives, and we’d both been jolted into an awareness that life is short and moments are not to be wasted.

CFL can be literally slow — when the calypso orchids are in bloom he can take an hour and a half to walk just one mile of trail. He… counts… every… flower… and comes back the next day to count… every… flower… again. He is very happy in the moments that he spends with those flowers.

I’m not such a slow runner anymore, but I find increasing happiness in the places I can go as I continue to gain strength and agility. Trail running in a beautiful place is the closest thing I have ever found to the sheer, simple joys of childhood.

I define happiness in the Aristotelean sense of “a whole life well-lived.” When we walk, run, bike or hike we are living fully in those moments and finding happiness in them. When we brew beer, we fumble our way from one step to the next with lots of joking and laughter. When we open a bottle of our homebrew four or more weeks after brew day, we are happy, satisfied, and proud of what we have done together and of how wonderful this moment feels. If we can add up enough of those moments, they might just total up someday to a whole life well-lived.

Not that we’re keeping score or anything…

For now I’ll just take the moments, and let the moments accumulate, trusting that as they accumulate I will be living each one as fully as I can.

When we realized that we were both on an activity streak and that neither one of us intends to break it, we told each other we would not be competitive; we would be mutually supportive. Now we each make room in our daily routine for the thirty minutes or more of activity that brings us happiness — whether we walk or hike together or he rides his bike while I run behind him. It’s already becoming something that we simply do each day without fail… because to do so is to live this day: fully, slowly, and happily.

Charlie wasn’t a runner, but I think he would understand and applaud our conscious approach to these moments.

I’ll miss you Charlie… and I’ll never think of you without smiling. You were a truly happy man, an exemplar of happiness, a model of unconditional positive regard, and a most cherished friend. Farewell!