Last week the sky brought us warm sun, pouring rain, dog-feared thunder, sleet, and last night a thin wet coating of snow.

The lake had been promising to open up for a week. Ogre Island was just out of reach across the ice:

2 otters hung out on the ice eating fish between dives. They were sleek and fat.

Wednesday the ice broke up and I canoed out to our island with the dogs:

Mika revels in having the run of our island. She doesn’t have to wear a leash and she can run her heart out:

The dogs scoured the whole island looking for little furry things to kill:

They found a nest of young mice.

I sat and let the calm soak into my bones. Canoeing and sitting on my ass on the island are healing. As much as I love the beauty of winter I am happiest when I canoe every day.

The loons arrived on Wednesday when the ice broke up. I was behind the cabin playing with the dogs when I heard their first call. Other than certain female voices the cry of the loon is my favorite sound.

Last Sunday I saw spring’s first mudminnows swimming upstream to spawn. I was visiting Brook and Stephanie (owners of Cafe Wren) and they took me down to the brook leading from the beaver pond they overlook. Sure enough we spotted mudminnows right away - 3″ long cigar-shaped fish doing a miniature version of a salmon run. These guys are smarter than salmon because they don’t die after they spawn.

Here’s a shot of a mudminnow I netted in my own creek 2 years ago:

I’ve got 4 of them in my native fish aquariums and they are cool little guys.

I’ve got the woodstove glowing and am about to return to ChipWits. Margaret and I are upgrading the graphics in a way that will make the game stand out from the crowd.

(I’ve misplace my camera so these pictures are all from previous years.)

Trumpeter Swans are back. I don’t know if these pairs are going to stick around or if they are just passing through:

Last year a pair successfully raised one cygnet. I bet the male loon shows up next week. I hope the loons have another successful year. They’ll have to find another nesting site because the lake has risen.

I celebrated the swans’ arrival by giving myself a radical makeover:

After the last snowstorm the car got stuck on the last climb:

Back to ChipWits hacking. I hope to launch a new contest this weekend.

I’ve always felt that “grey” is greyer than “gray”.

Margaret, my beautiful but criminally insane

daughter , trained my horrible dogs to torture a frog puppet.

They seem to like the activity, twisted though it is, so I indulge them with bouts of Kill the Frog:

Travis, driven mad with frog-hate, moves in for the kill:

When he has the frog in his mouth Travis is pure evil:

Mika isn’t intimidated. She wants that frog:

Once Mika has the frog it’s hers:

and Travis doesn’t bother to fight her for it. Mika is too intense when she plays tug-of-war. She loves to pull and she won’t let go and she’s 39 pounds of bone and muscle. She’d play tug-of-war all day if she could train a human to be her slave. She doesn’t care about HAVING the frog - she wants to play tug with it, so she doesn’t keep it to herself for long:

She runs right up to me and demands that I try to pull it away from her:

Pitying the poor frog, I rescue it:

We reenact the eternal Battle Between Dog and Frog Puppet 2 or 3 times a night. The dogs lure me outside to play by being unbearable cute and eager.

On the Frabjuous Day front:

NO MORE SLEDGING OF SUPPLIES, LAUNDRY, AND TRASH!

I had to drive fast to plunge through a foot of wet snow where the road dips into the valley, but I can now drive up to the cabin:

Spring has sprung at The Pad.

We are creatures of habit here at The Pad. My dogs and I live a comfortable daily rhythm.

Every morning the first thing we do is GET MEAT! The dogs wait for me to wake and when I stir Travis gives me a minute of snuggling and chin-kissing. I yell “MEAT!” and they scram for the dog door while I grab my robe and slippers. It’s an explosive way to start the day.

I get them pieces of meat from the fridge while they wait outside. Some days they get a big piece of meat and take their time eating it. Other days I scatter little pieces around the yard for them to hunt.

I, meanwhile, prepare my morning latte while looking out the kitchen window at this scene:

The meat feast isn’t over, however. Years ago in a moment of generosity I gave the dogs a second, smaller piece of meat after they finished their first. “Meat dessert” is now a mandatory fixture of our daily schedule; I never forget to fling them their second piece.

I retire to my computer to drink my latte and eat oatmeal while I read my lib political blogs.

Being a geek with a few scrozzled neurons I don’t wake at dawn. I average a 1pm wake-up, so the day is well along by the time we see it. After breakfast it’s time for our daily walk or canoe.

Then the boring part of the day for the dogs as I write and program at my infernal device.

A few times every evening the dogs gang up on me and mount a cuteness offensive, generally jumping around like ninnies until they get my attention and convince me it’s time to play. So we run outside in a jumble and chase each other like ninnies:

Sometimes I howl as loud as I can just to listen to the echoes. Neither of the dogs are howlers so they are rather non-plussed at this.

Most nights I’m in bed reading by 2 and asleep by 4. Nine hours of shuteye and I’m ready to give my dogs some MEAT!

MacLife.com just rated ChipWits as the 8th best Apple game ever.Out of all the thousands of games published on the Mac and Apple in the past 30 years they consider ChipWits the 8th best!

You might recognize a few of the games ChipWits beat:

“We had a hard time settling on 10. In no order, SimCity, Oni, Glider, Bolo, Crystal Quest, Out of This World, Deus Ex, Diablo, Civilization, The Secret of Monkey Island, Starcraft, Lemmings, Spaceward Ho!, Ultima, Myst, and World of Warcraft, were all significant but didn’t quite make the cut.”

Always nice when people like your work. I can’t wait until ChipWits II starts raking in the awards.

This Winter I had to haul my supplies into The Pad (my cabin) on a sled.

The last 200 yards of the road are too twisty for the snowplow.

I use a belly-band designed for skijoring but instead of harnessing the dogs I harness the supply sled.

I haul groceries in, laundry in and out, and trash out.

I take one trip (14 miles) a week into the big city (pop. 1,200) of Luck to get groceries and drop off my laundry.  Every other week I haul my trashcan to the car and drive it the 1.5 miles to the nearest paved road where the trash hauler picks it up.

Of course Mika loves to haul me while I haul the sled.

The snow is still about a week away from wearing out. I’ll probably haul the sled through the mud for a week or so after that. The road has to dry out before I can drive the car up to the cabin.

I’ve had a blast hauling supplies. Makes me feel like a pioneer in the wilderness.

I keep two aquariums stocked with fish I netted from Martel Lake - right out my front door.

My camera, a Canon Powershot SD1000, has an Aquarium setting so I gave it a whirl. It caught a few very nice pix and a bunch of blurry ones.

First, here are the tanks:

I shade half of each tank to give the fish a more natural habitat. I want the tanks to look like the edge of a raft of lily pads, which is common on my lake.

Because they can choose between light or shade the fish show more interesting behaviors than when I had the tanks uniformly highly lit. In the shade zone they are more relaxed and swim higher in the water. They prefer to eat in the light zone. They are more skittish in the light - evolutionary adaptation to hungry kingfishers, loons, and perch who can see them better in the open.

North America has some of the coolest fish in the world. One of my favorites is the Central Mudminnow. I’ve got four of them, two in each tank. They are the rulers of the tank, but aren’t at all bullying. They’ve got a commanding presence. They look me in the eye but they don’t go out of their way to pay attention to me. If there is a hunk of food the Mudminnows swim right up and take their share first.

(Click the pictures for larger versions.)

Mudminnows swim up my creek to spawn in a bog about 200 yards from Martel Lake. For about a month in the early Spring right after snow melt they stage a mini-salmon run up Babbling Brook.

They only get around 6 inches long, and most who make the journey are smaller. They work their tails off to swim up the creek. They jump little dams made of tree roots and small rocks. I admire the heck out of the little fish.

I lived in Seattle for 10 years and saw lots of migrating salmon and it’s fun to host a scaled-down version on my land. I plan to videotape their run this Spring.

The Mudminnows don’t bother to come up to the glass when I pay them a visit, so their pix turned out a bit blurry, but I think their cigar-shaped regal presence comes through.

Here are two of them in a mixed group of fish:

A Pumpkinseed looks at the camera from the right of the above picture.

Of all the fish in Martel Lake Pumpkinseeds have been the most fun to watch. All Summer, a couple days a week, I fishwatch while floating in my canoe. During Spring spawning season Pumpkinseed males build rock nests in the shallows. They pick clean a bowl to leave a rocky nest. Females swim or are driven by the male into the nest where they spawn while circling. Males guard the eggs and young.

Pumpkinseeds are alert. They always keep an eye on me whenever I am near the tank. They are usually the first to spot food dropped into the tank.

Older male Pumpkinseeds have beautiful iridescent patterns on their bodies. My little ones show some shimmer around their gills.

I netted my four Pumpkinseeds last Spring so they are 9 months old. Last Spring was a great season for the Pumpkinseeds. In the bay of my island I could see up to 10 nests at once. Martel grew a bumper crop of young Pumpkinseed and I had fun netting mine from the canoe.

I always kept tropical fish as a kid. In 5th grade I wanted to be an ichthyologist and wrote an essay predicting that I would find new species of fish in the Amazon.

I only discovered that North America has amazing native fish after moving to my cabin. I felt cheated that I didn’t know it when I was a kid. I thought all American fish were either bass or sunfish or minnows. I didn’t know that their are hundreds of different kinds of American “minnows”. Fish store owners don’t tell their customers they can net fish from their nearest stream or lake as interesting as any from Thailand or Nigeria or Hawaii or Brazil and for lots less money.

I am a card-carrying member of the North American Native Fish Association. NANFA promotes “appreciation, study and conservation of the continent’s native fishes”. North America’s hundreds of native fish species are sensitive indicators of the ecological health of their habitats.

There are over four hundred species of Darters in North America. Gorgeous fascinating fish that are found on no other continent.

My favorite fish is an Iowa Darter - a stunning beauty:

I’ll share more pix of my Darter in my next post.

It’s my 56th birthday and my beautiful and talented daughter Margaret gave me this wonderful picture of yours truly, Mika the Husky, Travis the Shepherd/Collie/Whatever, and an anonymous flying squirrel:

Click the pic for the full-sized, non-jaggy original.

It’s 20 degrees here. I had a wonderful dog walk on the frozen lake to the east of me. It’s about 40 acres of long, slender bays. It is held in place by three large beaver dams, one of which blocks a narrow ravine that drops 9’ in a short distance.

Last week we had a thaw with rain and then the drop to -40 wind chill so the lake ice is smooth and slick. There is a powdering of fresh snow over the ice and there hasn’t been wind since the snow. The lake is a canvas for animal tracks – white snow and dark ice. Every animal that walked on the lake for the past two days left perfect prints.

The coolest were a flock of wild turkeys’ tracks. You could imagine that their bony splayed toes and claws belonged to velociraptors.

A couple of raccoons left trails like little human hands. This one was moving fast - loping along. See the distance between the paired pawprints.

Mika found an active mouse burrow which was surrounded by miniature trails. Owls eat field mice like popcorn. I didn’t see any trail that ended in a blur of owl feathers but that’s a common sight after a new snow. Sometimes a few drops of blood in the snow, sometimes a feather.

The biggest tracks were left by a large buck deer. Huge cleft footprints. He had been running a zigging pattern across the ice and slipped once when he turned, but didn’t fall. I didn’t see wolf tracks following him so I have no idea why he was running around. Maybe he was just enjoying being a big buck deer.

Looks like I wrote the magic query letter. I got a 2nd request for a partial ms. of Hel’s Bet

I am batting 2 for 2 with scifi agents. I sent out 9 queries on Saturday and 2 are thumbs up. I’ll spend today working on the synopsis and tomorrow mail it and 7 snail mail queries.

Then back to getting ChipWits out the door!