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Three Things Thursday: Vashon Island

It’s Thursday again, time for another Three Things Thursday, the purpose of which is to “share three things from the previous week that made you smile or laugh or appreciate the awesome of your life.”

Trip to Vashon Island

Just a 10-minute ferry ride (15 minutes if you count time for unloading vehicles) from Tacoma lies Vashon (emphasis on the first syllable) Island. Since the ferry leaves from Point Defiance Park, right near our house, we’d been meaning to make the trip some time. Yesterday “some time” finally arrived.

Vashon Island is about 13 miles long and eight miles across its widest point (about the size of New York City’s Manhattan, many descriptions say). It’s predominantly rural, with a resident population of about 11,000. It’s accessible only by ferry, from either Tacoma, West Seattle, or Port Orchard. There are two major towns on the island, Vashon and the much smaller Burton.

Many small local farms on the island offer produce and eggs for sale. Vashon Island also features a thriving arts community, with its own community theater and several shops and galleries that feature the work of artists from the Puget Sound area.

Tourists from the Greater Seattle area come to here for biking on the island’s many wooded trails or for kayaking. Both ferries and public buses operated by Seattle Metro Transit and Pierce County Transit offer transport of bikes. Kayaks can be rented through the Vashon Park District.

We’ll have to go back again, probably several times, because there’s a lot we didn’t see on yesterday’s visit.

(Click on any photo to see a larger version.)

1. Logs on the Beach

Vashon Island features 45 miles of shoreline. On a walk along the beach at Point Robinson Park we discovered that somebody enjoys using the driftwood like Lincoln Logs. (I told you this is an artsy community.)

2. Ivy

I have never seen a wall completely covered with ivy, like this side of a building in Vashon.

3. Heritage Museum

The Vashon-Maury Island Heritage Association sponsors The Vashon-Maury Island Heritage Museum, located at 10105 Bank Road in the town of Vashon. The building that now houses the museum was originally a Lutheran Church built in 1907. Museum hours are 1:00 to 4:00 Wednesday through Sunday.

Though small, the museum is well laid out. After entering, visitors learn about the history of the island by moving counter-clockwise around the central room. The exhibit begins with information about the island’s first inhabitants, the Puyallup Tribe. When European-American settlers came to the area in the mid nineteenth century, the Native Americans were relocated to the mainland. The Puyallup Tribal Center remains in Tacoma. Artifacts and reproductions of photos, newspaper articles, and other documents present the area’s history as a center of logging, lumber milling, boat building, and farming.

If I Had Three Wishes. . .

If I were a politician running for office, I’d have to present my ideas for improving the world plus my plans on how to go about implementing those ideas. Fortunately, though, I’m not a politician. Thanks to a recent WordPress Daily Prompt, I get to imagine a better world without having to figure out a way to achieve it:

Today is your lucky day. You get three wishes, granted to you by The Daily Post. What are your three wishes and why?

Easy.

Wish #1: Eradication of Cancer

I’m not wishing for a cure for cancer. Even if that wish came true, people would still have to undergo the trauma of diagnosis and treatment.

No, I wish for cancer simply to not exist. Eradicated. Gone. In my ideal world, nobody would have to deal with this cruelest of killers.

Wish #2: Meal Delivery to Everyone

I wish that every person on the planet would receive delivery of three nutritious meals every day.

Delivery of meals to people age 18 and over could be handled by drones. (Hey, if Amazon can do it…) But for everyone under age 18, delivery would be made by personal Fairy Godmothers. All kids should have their own Fairy Godmother so that they know they are loved and cared for.

As Abraham Maslow taught us with his hierarchy of needs, people must have their basic survival needs met before they can move on toward other goals. Giving everyone alive sufficient nutrition would improve the world by allowing more people to explore their creativity and ingenuity.

Does poverty cause malnutrition, or does malnutrition cause poverty? Either way, the removal of malnutrition from the equation would give people more energy to envision and to work toward building a better world.

Wish #3: An End to Intolerance and Discrimination

And an end to hatred. Imagine if all people worked together to solve the world’s problems. Imagine if everyone treated everyone else with respect, empathy, and compassion. Imagine if all people were allowed to contribute their best selves to society, no matter their religious beliefs or their skin color.

I’m not saying everybody is or should be the same as everyone else. What I want is a world in which all people are allowed to sharpen their abilities and to do their best work for each other.

See? Easy, right?

Friendship Day

Today is Friendship Day:

The United States Congress, in 1935, proclaimed first Sunday of August as the National Friendship Day. Since then, celebration of National Friendship Day became an annual event. The noble idea of honoring the beautiful relationship of friendship caught on with the people and soon Friendship Day became a hugely popular festival.

In the years since 1935 several other countries have followed the U.S. in celebrating Friendship Day. However, some groups celebrate friendship at different times of the year:

National Friendship Day is on the first Sunday in August.
Women’s Friendship Day is on the third Sunday in August
International Friendship Month is February
Old Friends, New Friends Week is the third week of May

On this web page you’ll find all kinds of information about friendship, including quotations and customs.

My own experience has taught me these truths about friends and friendship:

True friends are rare.

I should cherish each one.

Friendship cannot be forced. It has to come about naturally.

Choose Friends Wisely

In the article Making Friends in New Places, physician Nicholas A. Christakis looks at the beginning of freshman year in college as a time when a group of people who don’t know each other are thrown together and must negotiate the process of making friends:

At the start of freshman year, there’s a window of opportunity, when customary rules about social interactions are suspended, and when it seems perfectly normal for someone to sit down next to you at lunch or in class and strike up a conversation.

Similar groups, he writes, are teenagers arriving at summer camp and adults arriving on a cruise ship. At times like these, associations are not yet fixed, and people’s social inhibitions are suspended as they move about freely among the group in search of people to befriend.

In his observations of freshmen at both Yale and Harvard, Christakis has found that the window for making new friends closes after about three weeks:

Attitudes begin to solidify. Friendships become fixed. And behaviors that initially seemed open and generous might come to feel forced, or even a little creepy.

Christakis believes that we are hard-wired to make friends in new, stressful situations. He has studied both college freshman and the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania and found that both groups form similar social networks: one or two best friends, in a group of five to six close friends, within a still broader group of 150 people. His work with college students has lead him to this conclusion: “Whether students feel happy or sad, or catch the flu, or learn new things can all depend, in significant measure, on their ties to one another.”

In addition:

Humans are hard-wired for friendship in one final way: We like the company of people we resemble, a property known as homophily. We evolved as a species by preferring those with shared objectives — all the better to coordinate a hunt for a mammoth. But natural selection has equipped us with a taste for similarity at a cost: the loss of new insights and information that lead to innovation.

Christakis’s advice to freshman students about to go off to college is that they purposely seek out people who are in some way different from themselves:

befriending different kinds of people — people with a different religion or major, say — is indeed a good thing. Students learn as much about themselves and about the world from the informal curriculum provided by their friends as they do from the formal curriculum provided by the faculty.

You Never Know Where You Might Find a Friend

In the article The Day I Told the Ugly Truth About My Marriage, neuroscientist and novelist Lisa Genova, author of Still Alice and several other novels featuring neurological conditions, describes telling a stranger about the difficult time she was facing. The focus of this article as published on Oprah’s web site is “why it’s okay to admit when our lives fall apart.”

But I was more taken by the way Genova found a new friend by telling a stranger her story:

Jenny shared specific stories of the times in her life when she was most vulnerable, unable to imagine the details of a secure, positive future. I nodded, my heart recognizing itself. I told her more about my situation, looking into her eyes, not editing a thing. She told me more, this time about freedom and her unwavering belief in happiness and love, and I began to get a glimpse of a bigger perspective, this moment as a single dot in the unfinished dot-to-dot picture of my life.

Since that time, the two women have become close friends. Genova concludes with the observation that sharing a bit of ourselves with someone may result in judgment, pity, or shame. “Or, you could realize you’re sitting on a bench next to someone you love. For me, that’s worth the risk.”

Sometimes synchronicity kicks in and offers you the opportunity of a lifetime. You can’t plan or orchestrate this type of meeting, but you can be receptive to its appearance in your life.

Blog a Day Challenge: July Report

After the chaos of my June blogging, in July my main goal was simply to get back into the habit of writing and publishing a post every day. At that I succeeded.

However, I did not work on my word for the year, story.

And I anticipate a bit more chaos in the upcoming weeks because we are taking a two-week cruise along the West Coast between Seattle and Alaska during the last week of August and the first week of September. Once again, both my internet connectivity and my free time will be limited. I am therefore not setting any specific goals other than to end up with a post for each day until the second week of September.

Here are my statistics for last month:

Number of posts written: 31

Shortest post: 210

Longest post: 1,770

Total words written: 22,340

Average post length: 721

I was happy to get my word count back up after June’s scant month. In fact, July’s total word count was the second highest of my seven months of this blogging challenge. And my average post length was the third highest; although I had seven posts of 1,000 or more words in July, I also had several shorter (500 words or fewer) posts as well.

Distribution of posts across my three blogs:

Because our two-week European vacation produced an inordinate number of posts to my personal blog, Retreading for Retirement, in June, in July I tried to even up the number of posts across the three blogs.

The total of posts here may not equal the number of posts written last month because I occasionally publish the same post on more than one blog. However, I have included each post only once in my total word count.

Last month’s featured post:

The Love-Hate Challenge

I’m featuring this post for several reasons:

It was my longest post of the month.
The topic is one I happened upon in a visit to someone else’s blog.
The topic engaged me personally and therefore helped me concentrate on voice as I was writing.

Overall, I consider July to have been a good blogging month for me.

I’d love to hear your comments.

Three Things Thursday

It’s Thursday again!

Time for Three Things Thursday, the purpose of which is to “share three things from the previous week that made you smile or laugh or appreciate the awesome of your life.”

Trip to Leavenworth, WA

Since moving to Tacoma we’ve traveled along the West Coast between Seattle and San Francisco, but we haven’t yet gone inland from here into eastern Washington State. One of our new neighbors, a life-long Tacoma resident, suggested that Leavenworth would be a good place to visit. So when Franke Tobey Jones offered a three-day, two-night trip to Leavenworth, we jumped on the opportunity.

Leavenworth is located in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, about 120 miles east of Seattle. It’s Washington’s Bavarian Village, with most buildings in town decorated with ornate woodwork and murals of Bavarian motifs. In summer the buildings and grounds in the city are ablaze with full-color flower displays.

(Click on any photo to see a larger version.)

1. Bavarian Lodge

We stayed at the Bavarian Lodge, which epitomizes the city’s identity with its painted decorations and flower boxes. Our room was large, the bed was comfortable, and the free breakfast was delicious.

2. Decorated Building

Imagine a town full of buildings similar to this one and you’ll visualize Leavenworth. The paintings on the buildings were fascinating. The many stores carry a variety of items, from typical tourist souvenirs to hand-crafted cuckoo clocks and music boxes, nutcrackers, Dresden china, and artwork by local artists. There’s even a nutcracker museum, although we did not get a chance to visit it. Behind the building you can see the steep, rocky Cascade foothills.

With its Bavarian village setting, Leavenworth obviously caters to tourists. For outdoors folks there are nearby centers for hiking, climbing, biking, skiing, snowmobiling, kayaking, and horseback riding. Leavenworth is beautiful in summer, but it also offers lots of festivals and events during other seasons, including the following: Ice Fest, Christmas Lighting, Wine Walk, Maifest, Autumn Leaf Festival, Oktoberfest, Salmon Festival.

The highway to Leavenworth passes through Stevens Pass, elevation 4,061 feet, the site of a winter downhill and cross-country ski resort. Stevens Pass is often closed in winter when there’s snow in the Cascade Mountains, so plan accordingly if you decide to go in winter.

3. Eagle Creek Winery

We also had a wine tasting and tour at Eagle Creek Winery just outside the center of town. The heat and soil make the region a perfect place for growing grapes. We liked several of their wines and came away with six bottles.

We also attended a production of the play Into the Woods by the Leavenworth Summer Theater at their outdoor venue, Ski Hill Amphitheater. (No photography allowed there—sorry.)

Overall, the trip to Leavenworth was delightful. We hope to return on our own sometime. And now that we’re retired, it won’t even matter if we get snowed in.

What ”Going to the Office” Means to Me Now

This morning when I got into my car to drive to my office, I was afraid I might not remember the way. I haven’t gone to the office in two and a half months.

After the age of 29 I didn’t have an office that I went to every day. I had about a six-year stint as a stay-at-home mother. Then I began a 30-year career as a freelance writer and editor. Eventually we added an office for me to the back of our house. I then “went to the office” to work, even if that only meant walking through my family room. I did occasional contract work that required me to show up at a client’s office and work there, but mostly I worked from my home office.

When we retired, we moved 2,100 miles away and downsized from our 2,100 square foot house (that number includes my office but not the garage) to a 1,300 square foot unit (including the over-sized one-car garage) in a senior community. This is a two-bedroom unit, and I had to choose between a home office and a guest room in the second bedroom. Because we wanted to be able to have guests come to visit us in our new location, I was left without an office. Despite lining the wall of the combination dining room—living room in our new house with bookcases, there wasn’t enough space for all the books that my husband and I had both accumulated over a lifetime of reading.

Since I had a lot more books and work stuff than my now retired husband, the plan was to find a small office to rent where I could store my books and work. After nearly a year we finally found the ideal space and set off for Ikea to buy a desk and several bookcases. Once the furniture had been delivered, assembled, and installed, I unpacked my books, which had been filling up the garage, and got to work.

After a 30+-year career of avoiding both the academic and corporate worlds, I finally have a real office to go to.

“Going to the office” now means something quite different to me than it would have earlier in my life. I spent enough time going to an office in my early adult jobs and later contract work to know that I would not want to spend the majority of my life working like that. Staff meetings, the proximity of desks, crowded cafeterias, the semi-required socialization of after-work get-togethers all do not suit my introverted nature. And it’s not just that I like to be alone; I also work better alone, without the noise, movement, and other distractions of having a lot of people nearby. I feel certain that going to the office would have become something I both dreaded and hated if I had had to work like that all my life.

Now, in retirement, “going to the office” excites and invigorates me. My office is in a small building, and very little talking or movement goes on in the hallway. With my door shut, I’m able to work without distraction. Most of my books are here, and being surrounded by books has always comforted and inspired me. I had always wanted to shelve my books alphabetically by author, and the move allowed me to do that. Also, I now have separate sections for fiction and nonfiction.

I don’t ever have to go to the office; I go in when I choose to go. And now that my husband and I are traveling more than we did earlier in our lives, there are sometimes stretches, like the last two and a half months, when I’m not around to go to the office.

I realize that I’m very fortunate to have had my dream job of writing and editing from home most of my adult life. But now I’m enjoying going to the office—and sometimes not going.

Three Things Thursday

Another Thursday brings another episode of Three Things Thursday, the purpose of which is to “share three things from the previous week that made you smile or laugh or appreciate the awesome of your life.”

Vintage Cars

(Click on any photo for a larger version.)

Recently we had a few vintage cars on display here at Franke Tobey Jones during the ice cream social on a beautiful Friday afternoon.

1. Dodge Brothers 1928

The Dodge Brothers Company was founded by brothers Horace Elgin Dodge and John Francis Dodge in 1900 as a supplier of parts for automobile makers in Detroit. The company began manufacturing complete cars in 1915. Both brothers died in 1920, and the company was sold to Chrysler Corporation in 1928.

The wheels on this car are made of wood. The owner told us that he has gotten the car up to 50 miles per hour, but it cruises along best at about 40 mph.

2. Buick Special 1938

The Buick Special was the company’s entry-level full-size auto from 1936 to 1958.

3. Studebaker Commander 1941

Studebaker Corporation used the model name Commander between 1927 and 1964, except for 1936 and 1959–1963.

Letter to the Woman I See Walking Every Day

Dear Walking Woman,

I see you walking almost every day. You walk all over campus here in our retirement community. Sometimes I see you in the morning. Other times I see you in the afternoon. I have a feeling that you probably walk your circuit more than once each day. Or perhaps you walk different circuits at different times of day.

Soon after I moved in here two years ago I was walking to the front desk in the main building when our paths crossed as you walked toward me. As we approached each other our eyes locked for a second. Then you looked down. I said “hello” as we passed. You mumbled “hello” and kept walking with eyes cast down, letting me know you didn’t want to stop to converse. A few days later we again ended up on the same path, approaching each other. This time, when our eyes locked for a second, you looked off to your left. I got the hint. As we passed each other, neither one of us spoke.

Since that second time, I have avoided you when I’m outside. If I see you in the distance, I alter my path so we won’t pass each other. I’m an introvert myself, and I cherish my solitude, too. I get that you don’t want to stop and chat.

You walk all year. In the winter you wear a heavy coat, a knit hat that covers your ears, and gloves. I think you must live in one of our three options for independent living here, since your ability to walk so much means you don’t need assisted living care. Yet I have never seen you in any context other than walking. You don’t attend the monthly resident council meetings, nor do you take part in excursions such as the monthly Lunch Bunch trips to local restaurants or the quarterly dinners for independent-living residents.

I’ve even thought that perhaps you live somewhere nearby but come here to walk around our large and lovely campus. But recently I met a new resident here, M., who asked me if I knew the woman who walked all around. I said that I had seen you but that I don’t know you. M. told me, “She says she keeps walking because she’s afraid that if she stops, she might never start again.”

So you can talk, and you did carry on at least a minimal conversation with M. Now I have to wonder if there’s a particular reason why you talked with her but not with me. M. is an overtly friendly person. Perhaps she didn’t notice your body language and stopped to talk with you anyway. Or perhaps you reacted differently to her than you did to me. Did I give off some kind of aura that made you turn away to avoid me? If so, it was unintentional.

I’m glad you enjoy walking here. May you long continue to walk on in silence and serenity.

Sincerely yours,
Mary Brown

Three Things Thursday

It’s yet another good week for Three Things Thursday, the purpose of which is to “share three things from the previous week that made you smile or laugh or appreciate the awesome of your life.”

Olympic Music Festival

Last Saturday a group of us from Franke Tobey Jones drove an hour and a half out onto Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula for a performance at the Olympic Music Festival. The venue of the festival is snuggled into the grandeur of a forested, sparsely populated area.

Alan Iglitzin, a member of the Philadelphia String Quartet, founded the Olympic Music Festival in 1984. He originally intended the festival to be a summer retreat for the Philadelphia String Quartet, which had been the quartet-in-residence at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1966 to 1982. But the summer festival drew such large audiences that the festival quickly expanded from the three weekends of its opening season to the current twelve.

The Olympic Music Festival takes place in the refurbished barn of an old farm that Iglitzin purchased near Quilcene, WA. An extensive picnic area surrounds the barn, and many patrons arrive early and enjoy a picnic before the performance. Two listening options are available: seating on benches and bales of hay inside the barn, and outdoor listening (on your own chairs or blanket) on the grassy hillside adjacent to the barn. The outdoor seating allows families to bring children who may not be quite ready to sit still quietly indoors for an extended period. The atmosphere reminds me of Tanglewood in Lenox, MA, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

True Confession:

Last Saturday was a windy, overcast day with occasional sprinkles of much-needed rain. We did manage to eat our picnic lunches outdoors before the performance, but it was not a good day for photography. Therefore, the photos below are from our 2014 visit to the Olympic Music Festival.

1. The Barn

When Alan Iglitzin bought the farm near Quilcene, it had fallen into disrepair. He knew nothing about the farm’s history. But over the years he learned that the farm’s original owners were a Japanese American family who had built the farmhouse and barn to accommodate themselves and a herd of dairy cows. They also grew berries and other seasonal produce and for many years provided dairy items and produce to local residents.

When the U.S. entered World War II, the family was sent to an interment camp. After the war they were unable to regain the property, which passed through multiple owners but never again became a thriving, working farm.

In the 1990s Isamu “Sam” Iseri, the son of the family that had built the barn called Iglitzin and asked if he could visit his boyhood home. He and Iglitzin became friends. Sam died in 2004, but members of the Iseri family continue to visit their ancestral farm periodically.

2. Musician

For some, the festival provides the opportunity to speak to the young musicians.

3. Tractor

There are several reminders of the venue’s history as a working farm.

Three Things Thursday

Here’s this week’s installment of Three Things Thursday, the purpose of which is to “share three things from the previous week that made you smile or laugh or appreciate the awesome of your life.”

Seattle Mariners Game!

(Click on photos for a larger version.)

And awesome my life was yesterday, when a group of us from Franke Tobey Jones went up to Safeco Field for a day game between the Seattle Mariners and the Detroit Tigers. We sat in the Hit It Here Cafe, which is a covered area just above the right field wall.

1. Safeco Sign

Safeco Field is a beautiful stadium that officially opened on July 15, 1999. I especially like this sign along the third base side of the field:

2. Runners on 1st and 2nd

The Mariners had runners on 1st and 2nd in the opening inning but didn’t manage to score:

3. Cleaning up the Infield

The grounds crew rushes out for a quick clean-up job on the base paths just before the start of the 7th inning:

It was just about a perfect day for baseball. We were all glad that we had chosen the seats in the covered cafe, as people on the lower levels were in direct sun. The temperature was in the low 80s, but as always up here, it felt much cooler than that as long as you were in the shade.

We even had a bit of added excitement during the game: a fan ran onto the field. He was quickly tackled by security personnel and escorted off the field. He spent at least a few hours in jail and will pay a hefty fine. This guy wasn’t a streaker because he had pants on. I don’t know if you get fined extra for running naked onto the field.

The only thing that kept the day from being perfect was the Mariners’ 5–4 loss to the Tigers.

Trip to Vashon Island

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Trip to Leavenworth, WA

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Vintage Cars

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Olympic Music Festival

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Seattle Mariners Game!

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