Christmas in the Northwest is damp affair. A friend in Australia remarked that she would love to come up to experience a white Christmas, since the holiday in the land down under is translated to picnics in the park and searing heat. I didn't want to discourage her, but Christmas is rarely decorated with the real white stuff here even though the latitude would seem to be condusive to the white stuff. Rain is much more likely!

Having said all of that, we were delighted the first day of December, to see buckets of snow falling out the window. We all threw on our winter gear and went for a walk. Big, fat, feathery flakes fell around us and we threw wet snowballs for the dog to catch (and eat) while we walked. The new Wauna cats, gifted to the girls this last summer, insisted on joining us for the ramble. They were less than impressed. Unless fat rodents and fluffy birds fall into their paths, they don't see the exercise worth the effort.

Naturally, none of the snow stayed around, and we had record-breaking rainfall two days later that flooded this half of the state. Great brown plumes of storm run off tracked out into the sound, visiable as I made my way to work. I worried about the returning salmon. They are faced with such an apparently impossible task of replentishing the sound, and development and poor netting practices threaten to wipe out the natural runs. But we never have wildfires whip through during the summers....