Life on the Outer Coast

Another wet day, I'm becoming quite fond of my umbrella. The mist is nice, but my tomatoes would like a little more warmth. The rest of the garden looks just fine. There are lots of flowers for the hummingbirds, they especially like the columbines near the computer window.
This evening I saw a cedar waxwing in the garden. It was in the berry bushes behind the Kolkwitzia then flew up to a nearby dead branch on a Western hemlock.It stayed perched long enough (at least 15 minutes) for me to get a good look at it. Managed an adequate photo for proof, but not worth anything else. At first I thought it was a Bohemian waxwing, as that is usually what I see around here, but the back of the bird was toward me which gave a good look at a feature that I hadn't paid much attention to before. The white line (more properly the white inner edge of the tertials) along either side of the middle is really quite distinctive. The color was browner than the Bohemian, but that is often hard to feel confident about. The white lines are pretty obvious though.
Also out in the garden shaking the bushes was a juvenile robin and its parent (?).
I simmered the chocolate lily bulblets for about 15 minutes in a small amount of water. Sprinkled in a little salt and some butter and mashed them. The first taste was pretty good, but a bitter after taste developed. Most of the students also noticed the bitter taste, but two didn't at all. Genetic? It would be more interesting than the average PTC taste papers. Might be fun to send out chocolate lily bulblets in the lab kits for biology 103, but I'd hate to dig up that many plants.
I couldn't quite bring myself to cook all of the bulblets and saved about 12 and planted them in some potting soil in a starter six pack pot. I'll bury the pot in a vegetable bed and hope that I remember where I hid it. Why mark things when you can just lose them? I did find one of the Senecio pseudo-arnica I planted last year. Fortunately, I recognized it before it fell to a weeding rampage.

10 marbled murrelets on the way home this evening, 4 on the way to town this morning.