The eventual de-chemicaling of my house...

One of the projects the Otter had to do in an environmental science class was pretty simple and got the message across fast. Make a product diary for a week of all the things you put on your skin. In addition, research the ingredients of those products... you see where I'm going with this? Not to sound all hipster/hippie, but we put globs of scum on our skin full of unpronounceable manmade chemicals that often have negative impacts on us or our environment. Yesterday at work a coworker talked about how in one watershed up here there are measurable concentrations of cinnamon and vanilla extract in the waterways during the week of Thanksgiving. Crazy right? Now imagine all those shampoos, soaps, deodorants, moisturizers, hairsprays, gels, toothpastes, detergents.... that are pumped out of homes every day. While cinnamon and vanilla are relatively innocuous, those gnarly chemicals meant to fight stains, grease, acne, aging, smelliness, whatever, are not nearly as innocent.
So today I tried again to make deodorant. I've been making my own chapstick and lotion for maybe a year, but the first time I tried deodorant I wasn't too impressed with the results. I've been reading up on going without shampoo; instead you wash your hair with baking soda and condition it with vinegar. Maybe I'll be brave enough to try it... Brandon is pretty dubious of that adventure. He thinks my hair will perma-smell like vinegar. And that's my food for thought for today.

So a few weeks ago we moved and I started my AmeriCorp position with Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association (NSEA). To compound the stress (and probably in large part due to it) I succumbed immediately to a head cold. It was a tremendously overwhelming week or two to follow. Fun had by all! One bedroom apartments are small. Nothing emphasizes that more than boxes strewn every which way and loose furniture parts on the floor.
Clearly, I survived.

The job has become more manageable in the meantime too. I have fantastic coworkers (which I knew going into it), and a very different sort of work to perform than ever before. Today I interviewed someone. I barely have a job and yet I interviewed someone. My job isn't particularly sciencey, but it has a different people-oriented set of challenges, and its going to be one big long learning curve.

Because I still need the science outlet, and my Otter is sciencey, and I work for an organization dedicated to restoring salmon runs... We went on a little salmon sighting adventure last weekend. It of course, was a lovely late September day...

And we saw salmon in three of the several places we went. The water was just too high elsewhere. Here's a blue heron stalking some tasty salmon in Whatcom Creek, in the city.

Displaying with some grotesqueness the necessity for (and scarcity of) good spawning grounds.... We saw eggs that had tumbled out of a poor redd and carcasses galore in a tiny (less than a foot wide) side channel of a creek. Both above and left are from that channel.
 Boulder Creek teeming with Pinks (Humpys, whatever you like to call them).

 We also saw several of these guys, and I am sorry to say I don't know what they are... This one was pretty near death.

 Salmon are eaten by all kinds of things when they die, right down to the macroinvertebrates that young salmon (fry & smolt) dine on. A little gross if you over think it, but very circle of life-y

 Brandon showing what a healthy salmon spawning habitat looks like: Lots of trees to shade the water and minimize erosion, no garbage or obvious pollution... Cold Clean and Clear! And lots of dead fishes!

Wouldn't be fall if these guys didn't start turning up everywhere...

 We hope to go chanterelle hunting this weekend. We'll see what we find!