Those who enjoy reading my essays might be interested to know that I have a manuscript of essays, poems, and prayers that will be going out to its first round of readers soon. The collection has been accepted for publication and was originally slated for early 2026, but the publisher is interested in moving up to a date in 2025. When I began the project, I intended to publish a collection of the essays I have written in this journal, but as I started to pull the manuscript together, it became clear that I needed to write new essays for the project. I’ll have more details as things progress.

Part of the process for me has been to participate in several writers’ groups. I’ve been a part of a memoir writers’ group, an environmental writers’ group, and a poets’ group. Each group has put me in touch with other writers and offered opportunities to share some of my writing. It has been a challenging and fun process. One of the things that I learned from the environmental writers’ group is that many citizen science projects are helping scientists gather data on our planet, the effects of global warming, and other changes. One of the most well-known is operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers record bird observations in backyards, city streets, and remote locations. By making and recording practical observations, everyday citizens can aid scientists in assembling larger databases and gain a broader perspective than could be gathered by scientists working alone. Similar projects exist in various fields, including insect observations, weather reporting, fish and game counts, etc.

One citizen’s science project that captured my interest stems from an accident at sea. In 1992, a dozen shipping containers were washed overboard from the Evergreen ship Ever Laurel during a storm on the Pacific Ocean. One container was in transit from First Years, Inc. in Hong Kong, headed for Tacoma, WA, for import into the US. The container broke open and released 28,800 Friendly Floatees. There were yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles, and green frogs. Two oceanographers from Seattle who were working on an ocean surface current model heard about the toys floating in the ocean and decided they could yield information about ocean currents. The pair had previously tracked other spills of flotsam, including 61,000 Nike running shoes that had been lost overboard in 1990. They began tracking the floating toys’ landfall by asking citizens to report where and when each toy was found. First reports of them making landfall came from Alaska. Years later, some were found in pack ice above the Arctic Circle. A few reached the Atlantic Ocean and found their way to Greenland.

At least two children’s books have been inspired by the traveling Floatees. Their journeys even inspired a song, “Yellow Rubber Ducks” by Rich Eilbert. Of course, that song isn’t as famous as the 1970 Sesame Street song sung by Ernie, “Rubber Duckie.” If you want to learn more about the traveling Floatees and see one of the actual rubber ducks to which Ernie sang the song on television, the place to go is the Rubber Duck Museum in Point Roberts, Washington. The Museum has ducks dating back to 1911 and from across the globe. Rubber ducks were first chew toys made from hard rubber in the 1880s. Floating ducks first appeared in 1949.

If you want to visit it in Point Roberts, however, you’ll have to go there quickly. This summer, the museum is moving a short distance north and across the border to Canada. Point Roberts is a town of about 1,200 people at the end of a peninsula. The only way to drive to the town is to go through Canada. High school students from the town go into Canada and back into the US to get to school and make two more border crossings on the way home. Point Roberts residents depend on Canada for water, electricity, and other utilities. They are also dependent upon customers from Canada. Before the inauguration of the current US president, Point Roberts was bustling with Canadians who crossed the border for cheaper food and gas. But the shops, gas stations, and restaurants of Point Roberts are empty these days. Point Roberts is bracing for a loss of Canadian customers like our community, which is also dependent on Canadian tourists. Across the US, Canadian tourists spend over $20 billion each year in the U.S., even though the Canadian dollar has been falling against the U.S. dollar, making travel here more expensive for Canadians.

The reasons the Canadians are staying away are complex. The US President has questioned the validity of the border between the U.S. and Canada, referred to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor,” and persists in suggesting that Canada should become a state. He has imposed tariffs on goods entering the U.S. from Canada and threatened higher tariffs. Canadians see it as a threat to their sovereignty. From their perspective, it seems that the U.S. president wants the total collapse of their economy. They are responding by boycotting U.S. travel and goods.

To make matters worse, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement has made crossing the border at the two crossings in Blaine very difficult. They have reduced the number of entry lanes to only two or three, causing wait times to enter the U.S. to rise to 45 minutes to an hour or more. They impose exit inspections for days, backing up traffic to gridlock the town. Last week, there were waits of more than three hours to leave the U.S.

And it is even more complex. Entrance to the Rubber Duck Museum is free. Merchandise sales support the Museum, including ducks and other floating toys, T-shirts, mugs, stickers, and signs. Nearly all of the ducks sold at the Museum are made in China, like the floatees that fell off the container ship. The 145% tariffs on goods from China have forced the Museum to raise its prices. Although the tariffs are on-again-off-again, the unpredictable way tariffs are being imposed and retracted makes doing business on a small scale nearly impossible.

The ducks that fell off the container ship floated north. The ducks of the Rubber Duck Museum are also moving north, leaving the United States for a new home in Canada.

Mother’s Day is a well-deserved tribute to mothers. Yesterday was a pretty good day for a grandpa as well. The Green Team, of which I am a participant, led worship at our church in the morning. There was a lot of music, including a piece by our bell choir. I’ve enjoyed ringing bells since I retired. I had a role in planning the service and was delighted with the involvement and leadership of a team of lay people. Visiting with people after worship, I heard about the plans for the celebration of several families. I commented that we were having our family meal in the evening. Our children were used to not having big dinners at noon on Sundays with both parents being clergy.

After lunch, we had time for a walk, and I took a ride on my bike. It was a beautiful day, and I rode through the state park near our home, the busiest I have seen this year. We live in a tourist area affected by the trade war. Local businesses report drops in customers and revenue approaching 50% compared to last year. The park has been relatively quiet. Yesterday, however, it was full of people. Based on the license plates in the parking lots, there weren’t many Canadian families, but folks from Washington had turned out for picnics on the beach, clamming, kite flying, frisbee throwing, and relaxing.

I rode my bicycle past a family group walking with two members using walkers. It isn’t unusual to see individuals with walkers as the area is flat and the terrain is easy for those with mobility challenges. However, this group caught my eye because two women of different ages were using walkers. They might have been a mother and daughter, an aunt and niece, or just two friends. It brought a smile to my face to see that they were out enjoying the spring weather with family who weren’t in too much of a rush, so they could walk at a pace that was comfortable to everyone.

A small general store at the edge of the park caters to the campgrounds in the area. I stopped by on my way home and picked up some ice cream for our dinner. Our grandson is recovering from a tonsillectomy, and we wanted to ensure we had plenty of ice cream.

Dinner was simple to prepare. Susan baked a cake and gathered supplies so our granddaughters could participate in decorating. I roasted a couple of fresh fish fillets we had picked up the day before. I boiled and mashed potatoes and warmed up some baked macaroni and cheese. Susan made a green salad, and we were ready to eat. After dinner, I did the dishes while the girls decorated a chocolate cake with powdered sugar and fresh strawberries. Our strawberries have green berries developing, but aren’t ripe yet. We had bought a flat of strawberries at a fruit stand near our home.

One of the best treats of the day for me was watching our son out in the yard playing with his kids. They have a busy life with two working parents, big gardens to tend, chickens, and cows that need care. There aren’t a lot of opportunities for our son and his wife to relax. While she enjoyed a phone call with her grandmother, he was stretched out on the grass with his kids crawling all over him. It so reminded me of my father.

My father worked long hours running multiple businesses, and Sundays were his relaxing day. He often would stretch out on the floor in the living room or outside on the lawn. We had a lot of kids in our family, and there were often extras visiting. He let the little ones crawl over him and would gently wrestle with them. When I became a father, we had only two children, and while I enjoyed playing with them, our family times were quieter and more subdued. Our son has four children. After the girls finished decorating the cake, they joined the fun outdoors. After a while, the activities moved to the driveway and front yard, and the sidewalk chalk came out. We have the fanciest decorated driveway in our neighborhood today. It will all disappear in the next rain shower, but it is a reminder of a day of family relaxation and fun for a little while.

It was how I imagine God must sometimes feel about humans. One of the early traditions of our faith is Sabbath. One day each week is set aside for rest and relaxation. Work is tempered by a day off. The schedule is light, and people have time to enjoy one another. Just watching our family temporarily freed from deadlines and chores is a delight that reflects the joy of the creator. I looked at my family and said to myself, “It is good,” hearing the words from the stories in Genesis.

I was blessed with meaningful work and don’t regret the long days and short nights of my active career. I was blessed to work with good people and to serve alongside talented and dedicated colleagues. Hard work has been passed down for generations in our family. My parents were up while we were all sleeping, doing bookwork for the business and preparing for a day of busy family activities. When our children were little, I stayed up beyond their bedtimes and rose before they got up. Our children do the same with their families. There are always chores to be done and work to be accomplished. But occasionally, there is an opportunity to pause—a few moments to sit down or lie in the grass. Eyes may close for a few minutes, knowing that everyone is safe. Work remains. There will be problems to solve, meetings to attend, and concerns to address all week long. But for a little while, the chores can be set aside and we can sit and enjoy being together. Indeed, it is good.

Our grandson is recovering from surgery to remove his tonsils. The procedure went well, and his recovery is normal, but he is experiencing pain. He has been able to control the pain with Tylenol and is enjoying the opportunity for extra ice cream. He and his family came to our house for dinner last night, and I told the family I had fun thinking of soft foods I could make. I like the challenge of coming up with menus for special needs. When we have guests, I always ask about food allergies and preferences so I can cook to the joy of our guests and expand my repertoire of recipes. Our grandson asked for macaroni and cheese. I wanted to comply with his request in a special way.

We keep boxes of macaroni and cheese on hand at our house. All of our grandchildren like it. We’ve found a simple, quick-to-prepare, and relatively inexpensive brand. I can whip up a batch of mac and cheese in about 15 minutes from the box. However, I wanted to do something special for our grandson to show my love and support for him as he healed. I got up early yesterday and cooked elbow macaroni just slightly shy of al dente. While the pasta cooked, I hand-grated cheddar and gruyere cheeses. I drained the macaroni and tossed it with olive oil so it wouldn’t stick. Then I melted butter, whisked in flour, and added cream. I reduced the cream sauce, adding paprika, salt, and pepper. I added a third of the blended grated cheeses when it was the right consistency. I mixed the pasta into the cheese sauce and layered the pasta and sauce mixture in a baking dish with the remainder of the shredded cheese.

I put the prepared dish in the refrigerator, and in the afternoon, as I prepared the rest of the dinner, I allowed it to warm to room temperature before baking it. The special baked macaroni and cheese was well received. Everyone ate some of it, and our grandson with the sore throat had a reasonable helping. It was the only food he ate for that meal. He had plenty of room for ice cream for dessert.

I had fun making the dish, but my evaluation is pretty simple. It wasn’t received better than the packaged macaroni and cheese we usually have. My extra time and effort didn’t produce a special dish for the children. I went to the effort and expense and produced something of no additional value to the children. And, since I usually cook too much food when making things from scratch, we have half a baking dish of macaroni and cheese in our refrigerator that cost more to prepare than the packaged product. I’m pretty sure it has about double the calories as the boxed stuff, too.

As a parent and grandparent, I don’t like it when family members experience pain. I try to do what I can to ease their pain. I try to help the family by running to the drug store when prescriptions are needed, running errands, and doing other things to give parents additional time to spend caring for their children. I do internet research and try to educate myself to be a calm voice of reassurance to support parents. In the case of the grandchildren who live near us, they have plenty of good information. Our son specialized in medical research in library school and served as a hospital librarian and director of information systems for a major hospital corporation before becoming a community librarian. He knows how to do medical research and sort good research from all of the misinformation available on the Internet. And our daughter-in-law’s brother is a doctor who is a phone call away and is generous with his expertise. They don’t need me for medical information or support.

I know that my worrying doesn’t help. So I cook. I do what I can. I know that part of children growing into adulthood is learning to deal with illness. I know there is a balance between self-care and knowing when to seek professional help. I understand that the decision to have the tonsils removed was taken with care and only after experiencing repeated strep throat infections and other problems. I support our children as they make care decisions for their children. I just don’t like it when my beloveds are in pain.

Our family is fortunate. We have access to medical care. We have insurance to make it affordable for our family. There are a lot of grandfathers in this world who are forced to deal with grandchildren who are ill and who do not have access to care. The divide between our country's medical “haves” and “have-nots” is rapidly accelerating. It isn’t just medical care that is outpacing the ability of families to pay. Adequate nutrition is a significant problem in the United States. According to the USDA, 19% of all children in the US face food insecurity. That’s 14 million hungry children. I can only imagine the anguish of a parent or grandparent who tries to comfort a child who has to go to bed hungry.

I am not in a position to cook for hungry children, but I can donate food to local organizations that help feed those who are hungry. We have opportunities to donate non-perishable food at our church each week and I know several other places that accept donations. I can think about those children when I am shopping for groceries. Instead of spending the extra money on cream and gruyere next time, I think I’ll purchase enough boxes of packaged macaroni and cheese to donate half of it to a local food bank, assuming that other children might like the same foods as our grandchildren. There may even be someone out there who needs a bit of soft food for a child with a sore throat.

I haven’t figured out how to provide popsicles and ice cream for that child, but if I knew how, I would try it.

In the mid 1980s, the church I served purchased a television set and a video playback machine so that we could show movies at youth events and use videos in our church school. It is hard to remember just how little we knew about the entire process. We did not know about licensing and the distinction between having permission to show a movie in a home setting vs showing one in a public setting, We knew that there were stores that rented movies and that there were some movie titles that we wanted to show. At first our desire for movies was primarily entertainment. We frequently gathered groups of youth in our church for rallies and lock-ins and while the events featured worship and religious programming, having an extended time with teens meant needing to plan supervised activities to fill the time they were together. Showing a movie made supervision simple. The youth could be gathered in a room around a television set and we knew where they were and what they were doing for two hours. We could choose the movie. We used the motion picture industry rating standards, selecting movies with a G rating for general audiences. I used to tell the youth that if the movie rating required parental guidance then they needed to bring their parents to the youth rally. It was a joke in a way, but it demonstrated my nervousness about selecting movies that might offend parents.

After receiving approval from the church for the purchase of the television and the player, we were faced with a decision about what video format to choose. We had members who were proponents of Betamax, a format that offered superior audio and video quality. Looking back, I think that the quality argument was a bit silly since we had a home television set with small speakers and low resolution. I remember that another argument for Betamax was that the tapes were smaller. Space for storing tapes also was not an issue as we never collected a library of tapes. We rented tapes for occasional use.

The Betamax player that we got was quickly replaced with a VHS player because the differences in licensing meant that there were many more movies available in VHS format. Christian education videos weren’t available in Betamax format.

The debate seems silly today with movies being streamed over the internet. Youth have access to movies on their personal devices. They have home theaters with screens that are bigger than most churches and sound systems that reproduce theater quality. Movies are far less likely to entertain youth and youth events do well to plan other activities. Many churches are now offering youth retreats with digital detox, when they take a break from their devices.

I was thinking about VHS and Betamax in an entirely different context the other day. I have an electric bicycle. I purchased a used bike last year and have really enjoyed it. I’ve ridden nearly 3.000 miles on it. When the bicycle needed repairs, I ended up purchasing a second bike by the same manufacturer to use as a backup. Initially I thought I might use the second bike as a parts bike. The price I paid was less than the cost of a battery and I got two batteries with the second bike. However, I have ended up fixing up both bikes. I need to sell one, but I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet. The luxury of my current situation is that I have an extra battery. If I forget to plug in my bike to charge, I can swap batteries and go. I charge my bike at home. Our home has solar panels that produce more electricity than we consume so it doesn’t cost me money to charge.

The connection with the VHS/Betamax argument is that I’m pretty sure that I have purchased a bike with a non-standard battery. More and more electric bikes are adopting batteries that can be switched between brands. My bikes have batteries that are not the same size as the ones in most other e-bikes. I believe that one battery size and style will eventually emerge to power most bikes and it is probably not going to be the one my bikes use. Like those stuck with betamax players in a VHS world, my bikes will eventually become obsolete because the cost of batteries will exceed the value of the bike. That may have already happened as when I bought the second bike, I was able to purchase a whole bike for less than the cost of a battery.

I think that swappable batteries is going to become part of the future of electric bikes. In countries where the electric grid is weak, solar charging stations can be set up where bike riders can swap batteries and keep going even if they don’t have access to charging at their homes. The electric bikes can be used to charge the batteries of small devices such as cell phones overnight when the solar stations are not producing electricity. In countries such as Rwanda, where there are large numbers of motorbikes but limited access to grid electricity, electric bikes and battery swap programs offer mobility to hundreds of thousands of people without the air pollution and carbon emissions of gasoline powered bikes. The government of Rwanda has a plan to convert over 100,000 gas powered motorbikes to electric bikes.

Obviously I don’t live in Rwanda. I have the capacity to charge my bike batteries at home without cost. I have a spare battery so I can swap batteries on the rare occasion when I want to ride more than the 35 miles my bike’s battery provides. Swapping batteries also provides a solution for times when I forget to plug my bike into the charger after a ride, which is far more common than high mileage days.

New technologies often require time for standards to emerge. VHS and Betamax existed side by side for more than a decade before VHS became dominant. Video tapes existed side by side with DVD technology before DVDs became dominant. Many homes no longer have machines for video playback because digital streaming is becoming the dominant form of video distribution. Predicting the format of technologies in the future is not a skill I possess.

For now, I’m riding my bike and enjoying it. One day I’ll likely be faced with the need to buy a new battery and have to decide how long I want to sustain the old technology. I hope that is several years from now, but as was the case with video, I’m not counting on my ability to choose the right path.

The whales are back in the bay! We heard about them before we saw them this year. We were coming up from the bay the day before yesterday, when a neighbor asked us if we had seen them. We had not. You have to be looking for them to see them. They are easy to spot when you know what you are looking for, but a pair of binoculars doesn’t hurt. I feel like an ancient whaler, tempted to shout with excitement, “Thar she blows!” What we see first is the blast of water as the whale exhales. Our bay is shallow and doesn’t attract other whales, but the grays are different.. They are baleen whales that feed on the bottom of shallow waters, sucking up mouthfuls of sediment and sifting out the ghost shrimp. They dig pits in the sand large enough to be seen on satellite images. Our bay offers plentiful shrimp for the visitors.

The whales need a lot of energy on a long trip. Their migration is among the longest of any mammal. In the fall, they travel south along the coast to protected lagoons along Baja California. They give birth to their calves in those protected waters, but food sources for the whales are insufficient for the adults. During the winter, adult grays survive on blubber stored during the previous summer. They can go 3 - 5 months without significant food resources. The females give birth and nurse their calves from stored fat. When the calves are old enough to travel, they head to their summer feeding grounds in the Bering Sea, visiting the shallow bays and intertidal areas of the Salish Sea along the way.

The grays that visit our bay are part of a group known as the sounders because of their frequent return to the Puget Sound. Grays can be spotted in the Sound between March and May, and some individuals spend two or three months in the area most years. Our bay has a healthy population of ghost shrimp, but the large mammals find the best supplies for only a couple of weeks before they move on to other areas for more feeding.

There once were healthy populations of grays in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but the Atlantic population was hunted to extinction by the middle of the 18th century. Drilling for petroleum is not the first time human overconsumption of oil has caused environmental damage. In the Pacific, there are two populations of gray whales. The western North Pacific stock follow the coast of Asia while the eastern stock are the whales that migrate from Baja to the Bering Sea. Some of those eastern whales visit our bay. All gray whales were considered to be endangered, but the stock that follows the west coast of the United States was taken off the Endangered Species Act and is considered to be a healthy population with over 25,000 individuals. The western stock, in contrast, remains endangered with fewer than 200.

When it comes to seeing gray whales, we are in the right place, and their visit to our bay is a special treat.

We got our first glimpse of the whales for the year yesterday. We were walking along the berm around the bay, hoping to catch sight of them. We walked a mile or so and had turned around to walk back when we caught sight of the first blast. Once we saw it, we saw many others. Scientists have used drones to observe the whales. Mature adults dive nearly vertically in the shallow water. Sometimes their tails rise above the surface. As they go down to scoop the bottom, they exhale, making their bodies less buoyant. A ring of bubbles rises as the whale descends. After scooping the bottom, they rise to the surface, straining the shrimp as they blow out the sand while simultaneously exhaling through the two blowholes on the top of their head. The two towers of mist rising as they blow out blend into an oval that is easy to spot from a distance.

The main population of grays travels west of the San Juans, and most go up outside Vancouver Island. A dozen or so travel up the Strait of Georgia between us and the big island. Only a few individuals visit our bay. We can tell that there is more than one by the rhythm of their blows, but I don’t know how many there were in the small group we saw yesterday.

For someone who lived most of his life a thousand miles from the ocean, there is a lot to discover in our new home. We didn’t know about the grays and didn’t see them for the first years after we moved. Now we anticipate their return and look for them when spring comes. Since their lifespan is more than 50 years and individuals can live more than seventy, it is easy to imagine that we are being visited by old friends when they come to our bay to scoop shrimp.

When we lived in South Dakota, we didn’t plant our garden until after Memorial Day.. We knew spring blizzards were possible in the first half of May. We have been putting seeds in the ground and setting out bedding plants for weeks. The fruit trees are finished with blossoms, and the wisteria is showing off its best. The honeybees are out and about for nearly 12 hours a day now. It is a time of pleasant weather and lots of sunshine. I joke that the locals don’t tell visitors how pleasant the weather is here, preferring to talk about cloudy days and frequent rain showers to keep the beautiful weather all to themselves. May is a good time to visit the bay, whether you are a person searching for outdoor activities or a whale searching for shrimp after a long winter of short provisions. May is a good time for people who want to see whales to give us a visit and for us to be grateful for the visit of the whales.