Interesting sight

We live on the 3rd floor of our apartment building. Every time we come home, we get to walk up 32 steps...16 steps in the first flight of stairs, followed by two flights of 8 steps each. It's fun, especially when carrying lots of groceries or other heavy items. It's also one of the biggest reasons that I'm thrilled we had a moving company move all of our stuff in here. But I digress.

When I came home from school this afternoon, on the landing after the second set of stairs, I just happened to casually look up and over at the building across the parking lot from us. And this is what I saw:

Yep...it's a raccoon. On the roof of a 3-story building. I thought he was cute, and obviously, I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures. After watching him for awhile, a thought occurred to me. This guy can get onto the roof of the building. If he can climb onto the roof, then certainly he'd be capable of climbing onto our porch. Because we live on the 3rd floor, I often leave the sliding door open on our porch (with just the screen door shut) at night. I'm thinking, though, that this hefty fellow would probably have no problem getting himself through our screen door. And I'm also now thinking that our newly planted veggies may not be as safe on our porch as I assumed they'd be. Hm.

Whale Watching

On Sunday, Shawn and I went whale watching. I made reservations for us awhile ago so that we wouldn't be tempted to sleep in on Sunday morning. :) We left the hotel around 7:30 for the drive to Anacortes, Washington. The organization that we chose to go through is the same place that we used for sea kayaking a couple years ago. Once we checked in at their store, we drove over to the marina and waited to board the boat, Island Explorer 3.

We left from the marina in Anacortes and sailed through the San Juan Islands. The San Juans are north of Seattle, but west of Victoria, British Columbia. If you click here, you can see a map of the islands, and the inset map also shows you where the islands are in relation to the rest of Washington.

The entire trip was about 6 hours long, and it was beautiful! Not only were we able to enjoy being out on the water, watching the islands as we passed by, but we saw quite a bit of wildlife, including harbor seals and harbor porpoises. Our captain let us know that we actually did go into Canadian waters, but we eventually found a transient pod of Orcas!

Apparently, an Orca pod is normally only about 3-5 whales, and this one was comprised of 4 Orcas. There were 3 females and one male, and it was obvious even to me which was the male. A female Orca's dorsal fin is about 3 feet tall; a male's dorsal fin is about 6 feet tall! We probably watched them for about 60-90 minutes. It was amazing to see these creatures in their natural habitat! According to the captain of our boat, Orcas are an endangered species, so he couldn't take the boat any closer than 100 yards from them, but a couple times they came closer to us than that.

Shawn was able to get some pictures of the whales, but again, I don't have the cord here to upload the pictures. I'll post them next week, when we're back in Colorado. In the meantime, here are a couple of professional pictures! :)

Brief Updates

Nothing majorly exciting is going on these days. But today I met one of my knottie friends, Sheri! We had a long lunch at Applebee's. Since shopping at the outlet mall got rained out, hopefully we'll meet up again for that before Shawn and I leave for Seattle. This is Sheri and me.

Tonight, I finally finished reading Love in the Time of Cholera. I don't care that it's on the list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die." I don't care that Oprah chose it for her book club. And I don't care that it is now "a major motion picture." I didn't like it. Next up is a book I picked up from the library this afternoon: A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. This is the same guy that wrote High Fidelity. I really liked that movie, and I'm hoping that this book will be a major change from Cholera.

Finally...I'm pretty sure that I heard a mountain lion tonight! I've heard this same noise outside my apartment before, but I've never seen whatever animal is making it. I found videos online that have mountain lions screaming (thank you, YouTube), and I'm almost positive it's the same sound. I would link the video that has the best example of what I heard, but frankly, the pictures that are on the video are a bit too graphic for my blog. (If you really want a link to the pics of a lion eating a freshly killed deer, let me know and I'll send it to you!)

Pictures

Two posts in one afternoon! Wow. :) I finally figured out how to get pictures off of Shawn's camera, so I wanted to post a couple of these before I forget.

This is the white deer that Shawn and I saw about a month ago in Evergreen. You can see the "normal" brown deer off to the right of it.
This is one of the goats that Shawn saw on his hike on Sunday. When the saw the mountain goat on the trail, he sat for awhile to watch. One of them just meandered over to him, and was only about 2 feet away! To give you some perspective, Shawn didn't use the zoom lens on either of these.

Our "Wild" Weekend

Shawn and I had a great Memorial Day weekend. On Friday night, I went to the Rockies/Mets game with a group of friends. We had a great time, especially since the Rockies won in 13 innings! I didn't get to see the 13th, since I had to leave to pick up Shawn from the airport. On our way back through town, we met up with Jarid for a little bit, which we normally don't do. But it felt like being back in college again. :)

On Saturday, we mostly just took it easy. We did go to the house of one of my colleagues for a little party. Her house is up in the mountains, at about 10,000 feet of elevation! The house was gorgeous, and Shawn was in love with the view from the porch. The road getting there was a bit rough, though! There's no way my little car could've made it...you definitely need 4-wheel drive.

On Sunday, we decided to go for a hike. We left early Sunday morning, and before we'd even gotten out of town, we stopped the car to take pictures. What caught our attention was a white deer! We thought it was albino, but after getting a good look at it, I noticed there were a few little brown splotches on its face. I guess that makes it "piebald." This isn't "our" deer, but it looked something like this.

We also saw a fox right next to the little group of deer, so we were able to get some good pictures of him, too. Then, towards the end of our hike, we saw a family of marmots. One of them let us get within about 10 feet of him before scurrying into his hole. Again, this isn't the one we saw, but this is what a marmot looks like.

We attempted to summit Mt. Sherman, but frankly, I'm just a bit too out of shape to summit a fourteener in the snow. So we made it to an elevation of almost 13,000 feet before turning around. I was VERY tired by the time we got back to the car! It's a bit disappointing, though, getting that high but not making the summit. I think that this is one mountain we'll have to try again sometime this summer.