It’s official. The rain is falling and with it so are everyone’s spirits. We pride ourselves in liking the rain and the wet in Seattle, but there’s something so sad about the first hard rain after school starts. Sigh!

I came across this video today, which reminded me that one of the best ways to cure the blues is with a little dancing, curing funk with funk if you will. Watch the above video, which compiles 40 or so classic movie dance scenes (see how many you can identify). Then play your favorite dance tune and have at it for four minutes. You’ll thank me.

If August has a theme it’s Indian food! I don’t know why I wanted to make Indian dishes so badly this month. Maybe it was the heat of the food matching the heat of the day. Anyway, if you haven’t been to Salad Days in while, here’s what went down over there this month:

Aug. 5th: Cruelty free, gluten free cookies
Aug. 12th: Pasta with Potatoes, Green Beans, and Lemon-Basil Cream
Aug. 18th: Indian-Spiced Lentil Ragu
Aug. 24th: A perfect Indian meal

When I reorganized the office, I raised the monitors up on a shelf. Bentley discovered that he could fit under the shelf today and promptly decided it was his new sleeping spot.

We’ve ridden to Paradise; we’ve ridden to Sunrise. Today we rode around Mt. Rainier. Too bad the clouds were so thick we couldn’t actually see the mountain. Or maybe that’s a good thing - no distractions.

Every good motorcycle ride starts with breakfast at The French Bakery.

A quick stop at the Kautz Creek trailhead before continuing to Paradise.

We stopped at the new visitor’s center. It’s pretty and functional, but it doesn’t have the same charm as the old visitor’s center. Boo!

It’s about time that Simon’s Cat weighed in on the topic of the dangers of leaving kittens and boxes unattended.

I think it took J Patrick Boyle about 25 seconds to realize that this interview was not going the way he expected it to.

In 2006, I shot a bunch of pictures of my friend’s all-women hockey team. I forgot my memory card that day, so I borrowed her husband’s memory card. Somewhere along the way, the images were lost. Then he found them and sent me a CD with them. Then I lost the CD. As I was cleaning out my office today, I found it again. Doesn’t she look bad ass?

Her hockey playing days came to an end the following winter when she got pregnant with her first child. We built a special snow-woman in her honor. We fully expect to see her back on the ice in a few years, though, when the kiddos are a bit bigger.

You know you have bought a lot of Canon cameras over the years when you have four copies of the company’s utilities software. I found these while cleaning out the office this week. Think I can get rid of a few?

One peak per weekend is just not good enough when you’ve missed a whole summer of climbing, so today I returned to the Pass for a jaunt up Silver Peak. This wasn’t so much a scramble as a hike on an unmaintained trail, but it was good for conditioning the climbing legs.

It’s been a long summer of crummy weather and studying for the bar exam, which is why the first peak of the summer (even if it was an easy scramble) was so sweet. Click the picture above to see more images from the day.