Anacortes Art Festival

Sawako and I watched our grandson last night and stopped by the Anacortes Art Festival today. 

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New - Used Car

Our trusty Toyota Highlander finally reached the end of its useful life after 22 years and 273,000 miles. 

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Canada - Cathedral Lakes Lodge, Day 4

We started our last day here by watching a mountain goat right outside the lodge. 

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Canada - Cathedral Lakes Lodge, Day 3

Today we hiked around and up Scout Mountain on the Diamond trail (the blue loop at the top of the map)

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Canada - Cathedral Lakes Lodge, Day 2

After a wonderful breakfast, we took a hike to around the Rim trail to the Giant Cleft which is a big gap in the Rim.

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Canada - Cathedral Lakes Lodge, Day 1

Drove from the Keremos hotel to the basecamp parking lot to catch the 1000 shuttle to the lodge. 

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Canada: Keremos

Started a 6 day trip in the south of British Columbia, CA.  The weather is very hot (over 100F) and smokey due to wildfires. 

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Harbor Island Paddle

I paddled around Harbor Island in Seattle.  Even though it started out cloudy at 1100, by 1300 it was very nice out.

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Wallowa Valley - Day 3: Hiking

After visiting the Foundry in the morning, we hiked the Falls Creek Trail to Legore Mine from the Hurricane Creek Trailhead.

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Wallowa Valley - Day 3: The Foundry

We woke up and ate a wonderful breakfast while watching the deer in the yard. 

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Wallowa Valley - Day 2

Today after a wonderful breakfast we took the Wallowa Tramway to the top of Mt Howard and then kayaked on Wallowa lake.

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Wallowa Valley - Day 1

Sawako and I took a trip to the town of Joseph in North-Eastern Oregon deep in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. 

View from the Bronze Antler B&B

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Volunteering - Say Yes to Life Swims

A few days ago I was a safety kayaker for people participating in Say Yes to Life Swims. 

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Volunteering - Tunnel Marathon

 A few days ago I volunteered to work an aid station at the Tunnel Marathon held at Snoqualmie Pass in Washington State.

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Task list and personal knowledge base

Over the last several months I have moved to Obsidian to track tasks and act as a personal knowledge base. 

I have been tracking Obsidian for years as it added features, but it never had a task manager until recently. Before I use Remember the Milk for taska and Joplin as a knowledge base.  The problem was I had information in two locations and would often look in the wrong location. In addition, these systems required yearly payments to get syncing between my phone and computer to work. 

With Obsidian, all my data is in one place so a global search finds what I am looking for. Using various plugins, I can customize the notes and tasks to my workflow.  For syncing between my phone and laptop, I use Syncthing.  Whenever my phone and laptop are on the same wireless network, the Obsidian data is synced. And best of all - it just plain works. 

The primary Obsidian plugins I use are:

• Edit history: so I can recover things when I delete them accidentially. This works great across the phone and laptop (e. g. if I delete parts of a note on the phone and notice it on the laptop a few hours later, I can restore the information)
• TaskNotes: this is my task list where each task is a note.  That way I can have lots of information about the task. 
• Hidden  folder: hides the folders with the tasks in them as I only want to modify these notes via the TaskNotes interface. 
• Templater: allows me custom templates for my daily notes. 
• Omnisearch: true global search across notes and attachments
• Text extractor: extracts text for omnisearch from attachments
• Open tab settings: makes sure the tabs I want to see are opened on startup - the daily note and task list

If you are looking for a free, very good tool that just works to manage your task list and personal knowledge base; I highly recommend Obsidian.  Using Syncthing, you can get all the data on your phone and laptop in complete sync. 

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Oppo N6 Phone

Before I left Japan, I replaced my end of life Pixel 6 with an Oppo Find N6 foldable phone.

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Hikarigaoka Park in the Spring

 Just a few photos from springtime in the park. 

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Issaquah Garden

 Got my garden in for the year...

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Shakujii Park

 An hour walk or 30 min bus from our apartment is Shakujii Park. 

It is very different from Hikarigaoka park in that half of it is reserved for nature.  It also has a few shrines and remains of a castle.  The quiet half is wonderful for communing with nature as it is so peaceful.

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Favorite photos

I curated my favorite animal and plant photos from 2025 and put them on a separate page for easy viewing and access.  Use the main menu or click on Favorite Photos.  Enjoy!

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