The End of the Oakland A’s

6FPS V6#10: October 14, 2024

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

We’re clearly into fall in Washington. It was hot and dry, and then suddenly it got cold and wet, and since then it’s stayed cooler, with a couple of early rain storms working through. The weather folks used the phrase “Atmospheric river” this morning for the first time in a while, and so it looks like clearly moving to grayer and damper days. Days are getting shorter quickly, too, where we’ve gone from 9PM sunsets to before 7PM already. The Big Dark is approaching again.

Other than the trip I took out to the coast (see below), it was a busy but quiet month. We had the landscaping team out here for a big fall cleanup, the electrician out to fix a failed ceiling light (with 30 days left in the warranty), and now I’m looking forward to not having to worry about having tradesfolks in here doing things again until spring.

It’s been really slow with the birds, but I’m starting to see the winter juncos, and we had both Hairy Woodpecker and Northern Flicker visit the suet this last week. I’ll be curious to see who our winter visitors will be. In wildlife, we’re seeing the raccoons regularly and also some deer, one young buck and a couple of females (I’m thinking a mom and an older daughter). The bear visited really quickly after two months absence, and left again when I went out and made noise. I’m happy to say I went an entire season without losing a bird feeder to Yogi this year.

The pellet stove has been cleaned out and filled up, and we actually turned it on for the first time the other night. So, happy fall, everyone!

New Phone Time

It’s the fall, so it’s iPhone season. I skipped last year and stayed with the iPhone 14, but this year, since I wanted to have the macro capability to play with, I upgraded to the iPhone 16 Pro (not the max). I also updated my watch as well, and all of my stuff is updated to the new releases.

First impressions: I haven’t played with the macro on the iPhone much yet, but overall, the phone feels very much like the old phone, but with somewhat better battery life. On my pelagic, I kept the phone tracking GPS in eBird for almost 4 hours and returned with about 60% battery, which was quite nice.

The watch is more or less indistinguishable from my old watch, and with 18.0 on it, had worse battery life, but Apple released 18.0.1 and now battery life is somewhat better. The Macs are on Sequoia, and none of them gave me any real issues.

Overall, happy with the updates, but I don’t have anything super gosh-wow to report, either. My phone battery was down to 80% health, so I felt it made sense to update. I’m currently thinking the iPhone 16 is a 3 year device, and the watch is a 2-3 year before my next upgrades, depending on what Apple pulls out of its hat next year.

I went to Ocean Shores

After my not-terribly-great trip to Oak Harbor earlier in the year, I’ve been meaning to take another short trip to see how well I can travel with the vertigo and migraine. When I took that first trip, I had just started with the management treatments and things weren’t as stable as I thought they were. This time, I hoped for better.

Ocean Shores is on the mid-Washington coast, on the north shore of Gray’s Harbor. On the south shore of the harbor is the town of Westport. While I’ve explored the coastline of Washington from the Oregon border to Westport a few times in the last, the area to the north are new to me. This are encompasses the coast from Ocean Shores to Taholah. North of that is the Quinault reservation, and is inaccessible by road until 101 gets to the coast at Kaloloch and heads north through the Olympic National Forest.

I stayed for three nights at the Quinault Hotel and Casino, a bit out of town, because for about $15 a night more than a generic room at a Days Inn, I got an ocean view room with a fireplace. Yay, offseason.

Offseason or not, the casino was surprisingly busy. I’d estimate 100+ in there every time I took a look. The room was quite nice and I’d stay there again. The casino is 100% smoke free and unlike some casinos, actually enforced it. It was nice to have eating spots on site; Emily’s (named after a tribe elder) was the more upscale sit-down, and I had dinner there once and breakfast twice. I was impressed with all of the meals. The other place, on the other side of the casino, was Big Eats, which, you can imagine, is for people who want food fast and get back at the slots. It was one step above a cafeteria, but the one meal I ate there was decent.

The primary reason to visit here was curiousity: I’d never been out here and I wanted to explore it, and see what kind of birding I’d find. Typically on a first trip like this, it’s more exploring than anything else, and this trip followed that. The birding was fairly slow, in part because the two locations I expected the most out of were ones that required some walking, and the day I scheduled to do them, of course, had a storm blow in and every time I got near either place a downpour started. My motivation to get soaked in search of a few ducks and sandpipers: zero. That said, I did find a few nice birds and some early winter ducks (at, of course, the sewage treatment plant, often a goldmine for birders if you have access), so I’m not complaining. I carried my camera, of course, but never felt tempted to pull it out, either for birds (all very distant) or landscape work.

Over the three nights I stayed there, I ended up driving about 550 miles including the drives there and home.

It’s a nice area, like most of Washington’s coast pretty with long beaches that let you drive on them. The towns are nice and seem for the most part to be in good shape and doing okay; not a lot of closed or run down shops and buildings.

That said, I probably won’t re-visit it any time soon. From a birding point of view, the area between Astoria and Westport would suit me better and cover the same birds, and photographically, that area would, I think, be more productive. But it was nice to unplug from the daily routine, relax, do some exploring and learn a bit more about this state I now live in, and eat some really, really nice fish and chips.

A key reason to do this, of course, was to better understand how well I can travel with the migraines and vertigo. A worry I’ve had is that driving itself could trigger or amplify symptoms. Three days of long drives exploring, plus the trips there and back, showed no signs of this happening, which gives me the confidence that I can, in fact, do this kind of tripping in the future with minimal worry. That makes me happy (and so did the fish and chips).

Next trip: probably in early December I hope to do 2-3 nights out around Ridgefield for some intensive birding in the Southern Washingtin refuges once the winter birds are here in numbers (Sandhill cranes! Trumpeter Swans!). Ridgefield is a long day trip for me from here, and Laurie and I will duo a trip in about a month, but there are a number of places down there I want to explore so it makes sense to put in a few days in a hotel to maximize time birding vs. travel. I may also put in some time along historic 84 on the Columbia while I’m down there. Other than that, nothing significant on the horizon until sometime closer to spring, when I’m mentally thinking about an Oregon Coast crawl (Bandon to Astoria, most likely)

And I went chasing birds on a boat!

Another thing that I’ve been wanting to do for a while is get out on a boat chasing birds. I’d scheduled in for a trip to look for puffins, but it got cancelled due to weather. I ended up rescheduling for a fall migration trip instead.

These trips are run by Puget Sound Express, which primarily does Whale Watching outings out of Port Townsend, Port Angeles, and Seattle. These are done in conjunction with the Port Townsend Marine Science Center which supplies the naturalist for the trip.

The trip was about 3 hours long, leaving from Port Townsend and headed out to Protection Island (where the Puffins nest in the summer), and then out to the shore along Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge. The boat we were on was the Red Head, which seats 40, and this trip had about 25 on it. The boat is quite comfortable, with a nice inside cabin with 10 four person tables in it and good outside standing areas for visibility. I sat with a couple of women who both turned out to be ex-Californians, and one was a “pandemic birder” who has really fallen in love with with the activity. They gave me a few places to check out in the Seattle area, and I talked to them about spring birding along the Oregon coast, and we had a grand time.

Total species seen was about 25. I saw 22 and spent some time helping some of the less experienced birders get onto them when I could. No lifers, but two species that are new to me in Washington: Red-Necked Phalarope and Sooty Shearwater, and about 6 year birds. All in all, had a great time around fun people, got some nice pictures (but nothing earth-shaking) and had a lot of fun. Will definitely be doing this again in the spring and summer when the puffins return.

Blog Hiatus was short

Last month I put my blog on hiatus while I figured out what, if anything, I wanted to do with it. That hiatus was short, because I quickly realized that when I have new images to show off, the place to do that is the blog. I have, though, decided to retire the Photo Wednesday and Feathery Friday posts; I don’t feel they really add anything and perhaps get in the way of noticing when I’m more meaty postings.

There was a time when I felt keeping an active cadence on the blog was important, both personally and for SEO, but it’s clearly not true for me any more, and I’m unconvinced it helps with the search engines, and may well hinder it.

So I’ll be posting when I have something to say, but I won’t be trying to hold to a schedule, and I won’t be pre-scheduling those image posts, at least for now.

Why? Because…..

Following up a bit on my essay last month on Inertia, I have been making some changes and pushing some things forward. One of the things I really want to accelerate is the weight loss, so I’ve been tweaking my diet to cut some more calories and trying to get my activity levels back up where I want them. I do seem to be seeing the loss speeding up a bit, but it’s early.

I’ve picked up an interesting perspective on this, though. Back in May, I did an essay on Should or Want, which talked about the challenge of starting things I think I SHOULD do vs things I want to do. I’m hitting up on this wall again. For instance, I’ve been thinking about doing an e-book again. One of the ones that’s been on my list for a while is is a photo book on sea otters, a personal love of mine. But when I suggest to myself I should do that, I find myself asking “Why?” and I haven’t really found a better answer than “Because…..” — I don’t seem to have a personal motivation to do it, and I haven’t really found an external motivation to get it done. Would anyone really care if the book exists or not? I’m unconvinced. So I’m still sitting around looking at what to do, while I try to figure out why I want to do it…

Speaking of which, the blog…

And here’s a question for all of you. As I try to figure out what to write about on the blog (if anything!), I have a number of ideas: I’ve been thinking about a series on “Stuff I like”, for instance, and I’ve pondered looking back and writing about some of my time in Silicon Valley, whether about Apple, Palm or even the early days like Sun or the early days of the internet and the web. But it’s unclear to me if anyone really cares about that stuff at this point.

So I open this up to all of you: what do you want me to talk about, either on the blog or here. Send me suggestions and requests. I can’t promise I’ll cover everything or anything, but I am going to let what you say guide me into the things I will consider and prioritize into my writing time.

And if I get silence, well, I’ll use that as a guide as well.