2015 Annual Report

Our year started off with a chicken chase:  In January, a local animal rescue group gathered up six abandoned chickens that Patti and I discovered in the parking lot at the trailhead of our daily dog walk.  The birds sent Patti a thank you note.

In April we flew down to New Orleans for a visit with Patti's brother and a birding (and eating) vacation from Louisiana to Florida.

In June Scott gave Patti and me tickets for a practice round at the US Open being held down at Chamber's Bay, just a couple miles from his home in Steilacom.  Here's Tiger Woods hitting into the 16th green, and Miguel Angel Jimenez and Angel Cabrera preparing to tee off.  The young blonde in the white dress followed Miguel on the course; apparently her only job was to hold his cigar when he was taking a shot.

In August I spent five days and four nights backpacking in Yellowstone National Park, and  Patti had a week of camping (kind of) and ranger walks.  In preparation for the backpack, in order to save some weight, I took Ger's advice and cut off the handle of my toothbrush.  Lydia and Daphne as usual spent the time at Allison's and Mike's, where Lydia would prefer to sleep in her crate, but as a house guest of Milo, he seems to have had first choice.

Patti continued with her classes at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle: figure drawing and pastels.  And she spent a few days down in San Francisco and Berkley visiting with Andra and Jennifer, and childhood friends Sara and Claire and Sara's husband John.

On August 6 Scott and Tina (slightly pregnant) got married on Puget Sound; and September 17, we welcomed our latest (and last?) grandchild, Harrison Anchor Werden.  I'm working on a spreadsheet to keep track of all the various grandkids, but it may be too much for Windows 10 to handle.  The Family Photos section has plenty of pictures.

Also in September, Patti and I and hordes of other relatives converged on Randolph, New Hampshire, for my cousin Julia's wedding to Andrei, plus a few short hikes.  It was the first time ever all eleven Folsom cousins were together in one place.  Here's a picture from 1955 of the cousins, less Ginny, Anne, and Peter, who hadn't yet been born.  The wedding was great fun; the flaming hulu hoop dancers inspired Kate to give it a try, with proper precautions.

We had a big Thanksgiving and a really big turkey, with siblings Andra and Jennifer flying up from San Francisco, Kate and Ger driving up from Oregon, plus Joelene and Michael and Andrew, and friends Doug and Sue.  Carol and Ken stayed down in Neskowin; caring for a recuperating Boswell and fixing a dent in their car.

After 30 years of wear and tear, we're starting to catch up a little on maintenance here at Dog's Breath Acres, before wear and tear get the best of me.  Had the floors refinished, and spent a day down in the crawl space (who knew you could have so many spiders) fixing a leak.  We've also been replacing appliances and furniture.  And here are some before and after photos of some clearing I did in the yard.

I did my usual hiking in the Cascades, plus a bit in Yellowstone and New Hampshire.  I guess part of being an engineer is a certain obsessiveness with keeping track of things and making lists: my hiking spreadsheet says I put in 119.8 miles with 28,950 feet of elevation gain.  On the other hand, I don't have an exact count of our near daily 2.7 mile dog walks on a nearby trail; about 300 times, for an additional 810 miles (or so).  There are pictures from my hikes in the Best Photos section.

We do love Costco; here's a few weeks' supply of Special K and Cheerios.  However, I did misread "bananas" on Patti's shopping list.  Does anybody need a five gallon bucket of banana slugs?

Lydia and Daphne are doing very well; we think our daily walk does wonders for their (and our) health.  We looked after Rex, Scott's and Tina's temporary foster dog, for a couple of weeks; a giant, gangly white dog with only one eye, but great fun, except when Daphne ran headfirst into a tree while chasing him around the yard.  Luckily he ended up at a new permanent home in eastern Washington, in a great spot.

Birding was productive this year, with six lifers for my ABA List, mostly from our trip to Florida.  Before that I ticked a Glaucous Gull in a field near home, where I got some good beta, from a couple of other birders, on where to go twitching in Florida.  (I think I'm mixing nomenclatures from a couple of hobbies; "ticked" means adding a new bird to a life list; "beta" is from rock climbing, info on a route.)  On the last day of 2014, Patti and I drove up north a little to see a Long-eared Owl, my nemesis bird.   And a partially leucistic Red-tailed Hawk, who has shown up in the neighborhood for about eight winters, was back.

With Comcast's elimination of free web hosting (which I was using for this website), I took the opportunity to finally download the entire Blodget/Richards/Folsom/Saunders family history website onto the internet, which I've been passing around for years on a disc to various cousins. I've been slowly updating the 19,000 or so pages so they'll show up better on a tablet, a massive project.  If you've tried the link, you've discovered that the website is password protected, contact me for the Username and Password.

And have a great 2016!