Late in the summer, I took the boys to an old stomping ground.

In the course of all our camping, we got accosted by this guy. The wind was blowing the scent of our picnic right toward him and you could really see his nose dissecting the air as he approached us. He wasn't one bit afraid but I think the dogs barking finally sent him in the other direction.

Later in the summer of last year, we bought a small fishing boat and spent some time in it. We never caught any fish with it though and this year we hardly used it because it just didn’t seem to work with our trips.

Right after we got it, we took it for a spin on our pond

So we loaded it up and headed out....

And then we took the new boat out on Fallen Leaf Lake

But after we didn't catch any fish we just hung out with the family.

Play hard, play hard. You know how it is...

Here are just a couple of experiences from the Spring of 2008 that I didn’t write about:

Colin shot a bullseye on the archery range at cub scout camp.

I don't know why I wore my uniform home. I must have been running late and wanted to come straight home without taking the time to change. When the kids saw me, you would have thought they never saw the uniform before. So we all took a picture together. They were wearing boxers because they were getting ready for bed.

Colin and his buddy William riding bikes in the Sly Park campground

It was little league night at the River Cats.... about 105 degrees and we were all dying!

We were studying "botany" and we called this meal the feast of the angiosperms because everything we ate came from an angiosperm.

The Buff Orpingtons are a really tame breed of duck, probably a little too tame for our area, which has a relatively high concentration of predators. So we are going back to the breed we started with several years ago; Indian Runners. They are much more flighty, so they will hold up better against hungry predators.

The guy who is driving the buggy carried it in the toy hauler they are parked in front of. After the sun went down every night, he showed movies by projecting DVD’s on an awesome makeshift screen, the back door of the toy hauler.

I managed to work a couple nice runs into the fun too, including one 20 miler with some coastal climbs mixed in. On my shorter run the next day, I found a guy from Point Reyes Oyster Company selling oysters out of ice chests on the back of his flat bed truck. We BBQ’d 50 medium oysters later that afternoon and I ate about 8 of them. Interestingly, I felt very well recovered the day after that. I haven’t looked up what’s in an oyster but I’m thinking I got some good protein!

This is me mailing my entry for 12 Hours at Cool Night Run. It is a 12 hour run around the 9 mile Olmstead Loop equestrian trail in Cool. It starts at 7pm on Saturday, August 12th and ends at 7am on Sunday, August 13th. My goal of goals is 54 miles, which will be 6 laps. Each lap has 900′ of climbing though, so really, I will be happy with 40 miles or more.

Ha, it wasn’t that long ago that I couldn’t even think of going nine miles, much less six times around a nine mile loop with 900′ on each lap!!!!!