Labor Day weekend is often a real beaut here in the PNW, and for the last few years Gabe and Dave have taken full advantage by having their birthday celebrations that weekend in Woodland Park, a lovely bit of acreage adjacent to the always popular Green Lake in north Seattle. Woodland Park contains a number of covered picknicking facilities, and a couple of remnants from the civic and community minded past: a lawn bowling green and a huge lane of covered horseshoe pits. Th

The Urban Dictionary defines "jive turkey" as: One who speaks as though they know what they are talking about...though they do not. Which is a pretty good definition for me, at least when it comes to turkey hunting. Late in the spring turkey season, which typically runs from mid-April to the end of May here in Washington State, I ventured out to the far northeastern corner of Washington, some 25 miles or so south of Kettle Falls. Wild turkeys are plentiful there, and two yea

This mother's day the family went for an outing to Anderson Island. One of the San Juans, you say? No. Uh...isn't it that one next to Whidbey, or Vashon or something? Nope. Anderson Island is the southern most Puget Sound island, which puts it in Pierce County. It is accessed via car/passenger ferries operated by Pierce County, which is why you won't find the schedule or terminal information listed among the otherwise ubiquitous Washington State Ferries routes. The isl

Fire morels are my favorite thing to find in the wild. At least until winning lottery tickets start turning up in the duff. Morel mushrooms, grouped under the genus Morchella, show up all over the world and are prized culinary artifacts. Their desirability is enhanced, no doubt, by the fact that they aren't cultivated commercially, which means that someone has to go pluck them from the forest floor. Or sometimes from their front yard. Morels will sprout occasionally from

I think we know a real thing when we meet it, even if we can't quite figure out how to describe it exactly. That feeling you have while staring into a fire? Can you boil it down into one word? Maybe so, or maybe not (I haven't succeeded yet), but it turns out that there are some specific words in other cultures and languages that get to the core of some "real things" concepts. And over the course of the recent long President's Day weekend my family and I went big on hygge