Today It Is MMG Making Me Homesick For Skagit Tulips While Grilling Russian Salmon

Today's make me homesick moment once again comes from Facebook. This time via an entity currently calling herself Margaret Mikota Grants who shared a collection of photos of the Skagit Valley tulips, currently in their annual bloom and color the valley mode.

Miss Margaret, also known as MMG, is currently planning a reunion of the class with whom I graduated from high school.

MMG is doing this reunion planning from her Minnesota location a couple thousand miles distant from the Skagit Valley location of the place at which we attended high school.

MMG is currently taking a break from reunion planning and is instead here in Texas not visiting me.

Instead of visiting me MMG is fishing at a venue called Fork Lake whilst staying in a town called Alba. Neither of which I had heard of and had to Google to find they are located a few miles east of Dallas.

When I lived in Washington I had a fairly regular supply of fresh salmon, among other types of fresh seafood, such as dungeness crab, oysters and clams.

For lunch today the smokeless grill in my kitchen is grilling pink salmon filets. From Russia, processed in China, bought by me in Walmart.

Such a thing should make me homesick, but for some likely irrational reason, it isn't...

Rosie The Rat Dog's Grizzly Bear & Sarah Palin Encounters In Alaska

Rosie the Rat Dog and her entourage have now made it to the Valdez zone of Alaska.

The latest entry on Rosie's Alaska! Blog has some really good pictures of grizzly bear encounters, like the one you are looking at here, in a blogging appropriately titled "Stay in your car."

The only place I've been where I had dozens of bear encounters, none of them grizzlies, was at Stehekin, on Lake Chelan, in Eastern Washington.

Rosie's pictures of all sorts of critters having a salmon feeding are something I don't recollect seeing before.

I also do not recollect ever seeing a picture of my sister paddling a kayak so close to a glacier before.

Does my sister not know that in summer glaciers break off humongous chunks of ice that are known as icebergs? And that it is likely a bit dangerous to get too close?

What with all the bears, moose, dodging icebergs and visiting Sarah Palin in Wasilla, I am appalled at all the dangerous situations to which Rosie the Rat Dog is leading her entourage.

Looks fun though.

Rosie The Rat Dog Is Now Catching Salmon In Alaska's Kenai River

For 5 or 6 days Rosie the Rat Dog was out of contact with the modern world and was thus unable to update her Alaska! Blog.

Yesterday contact with the modern world was once again established and so Rosie and her entourage were able to send out email and do some blog updating in a blog post titled Kenai Friends.

I am a little unclear as to where the re-connection to the Internet was made, I think maybe it was in Seward.

I suspect Rosie is out of contact again, now that they are on the Kenai Peninsula.

The two humans, who Rosie takes care of, have been getting their daily limit of 3 salmon, caught via fishing in the Kenai River.

The pictures in the most recent blogging show some rather spectacular scenery, including active volcanoes, in addition to the picture of Rosie the Rat Dog on a park bench under a giant mosquito.

I don't know if the West Nile Virus has made it all the way north to Alaska. I have read nothing about anyone in Rosie the Rat Dog's entourage getting mosquito bites.

Walkng Late After A No Power Lunch Catching Fosdic Lake Fish Thinking About Safe & Sane River Inner Tubing

There has been no swimming, for me, for two mornings in a row, due to the pool needing to be drained so the underwater lights could be replaced.

Today, at noon, I drove up to North Richland Hills for my weekly Wednesday restaurant rendezvous. As I exited the freeway I got a call telling me the restaurant was closed, due to power being out in the area, due to last night's storm.

North Richland Hills was hit a bit harder, by the storm, than it hit my location.

With the restaurant rendezvous aborted, I continued on to the ALDI Market in Hurst, not knowing if it was powered up or not.

It was.

By the time I had lunch I managed to overeat. I do not like overeating.

Coming up on 5, I decided I needed to get some pedestrian exercise. So, I drove to Oakland Lake Park to walk around Fosdic Lake.

I thought Fosdic Falls might be falling hard due to last night's rain. I was surprised to see Fosdic Falls barely dribbling.

I was also surprised to see so many people angling for fish in Fosdic Lake, where signs warn you to be careful about eating what you catch.

In addition to all the solo fishermen, there were two cute family groups.

The group you see at the top was a grandma, a mom and two kids. I know this because I stopped to talk to them after I took the picture. They'd caught a fish. A very little perch. First fish I've seen caught from Fosdic Lake. I should have asked if I could take a picture of it. But I did not think of that til later.

Grandma told me they don't eat the fish, their cat does.

The other fishing family was a dad with two kids, a girl and a boy. The girl was in a pink ballet tutu.

This group reminded me of my dad. Not due to the pink tutu, but due to the fact that when I was a little kid we'd go on family fishing excursions on the Skagit River. Sometimes it'd just be dad and me and my brother.

The fish one sought from the Skagit was not perch. It was salmon.

My brother strongly caught the fishing gene from my dad. Me, not so much. My brother passed the fishing gene onto my nephew, Joey, who continues to catch a lot of salmon in the Skagit River, without his dad, who has moved to Arizona. Where no salmon spawn in any river. As far as I know.

I never much enjoyed standing on a river or lake bank tossing a fish line in the water. But, I did very much enjoy fishing from a fishing boat out in the San Juan Islands zone. My mom and dad had a nice big boat, sort of a floating camper. Trolling for salmon is fun. Catching cod is fun. Sometimes when trolling for salmon you'd catch a shark instead. Dogsharks. Not as fun as salmon.

My dad caught a halibut over 180 pounds, once, out in the San Juans. I was not along. The local newspaper printed a picture of my dad and the big halibut. I must see if I can locate that picture and one of my dad's dad, my grandpa, with a giant sturgeon he caught in the Nooksack River.

Strange, it never bothered me to float in the Skagit or Nooksack Rivers, particularly the Nooksack. It's a big inner tubing river in summer.

Never crossed my mind to worry about a salmon or sturgeon encounter. No one organizes the massive weekend Nooksack inner tube float parties in summer. It just sort of organically happens.

Not the result of someone's brilliant brainstorm, like the one we learned about yesterday with the announcement of the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle's summer Rockin' the River with Inner Tube Happy Hours.