Bouys, a boat and a bulker

And, I might add, an ever-present bridge.

Some calm between storms in the new year.

Shot 1/2/2009.

The "boat" (as opposed to "ship") is Astoria's own Arrow 2, the Columbia River Pilot vessel.  She may look like "Little Toot", but this is a very task-oriented craft.  Very little wasted movement, and occasionally some astonishingly balletic moves when traffic is heavy.

Christmas Morning

With all of the fun of holiday travel (and not travel) and intermittent power outages over the last several days, I didn't really get a chance to get anything updated when I'd hoped to.

Christmas morning began with a pre-dawn deluge of snow that didn't let up until close to noon. I've lived in lots of places, and some where a white Christmas might even have been a reasonable expectation, but I think this is the first time that I've actually gone through snowfall on the actual morning.

I was supposed to be in Portland for the holiday, but with the valley under a sheet of ice, travel was not a smart idea. So, I went for a long walk from my own place instead.

The ships are pretty average, the river relatively calm, but the heavy dusting on the trees and hills on the Washington side of the river made for some unusual (for this area) shots.