During the deepest part of Friday night, long after the explosions had died down, my mother woke up to the sound of at least one roaring, upset seal. Maybe two.

It was far too dark to see anything, and Mom didn't think much of it at the time. She mentioned it to us casually in the morning.

About 18 hours later, early Saturday evening, I walked down to the rocks to listen to the water and watch the birds for awhile. I'd just about reached the shoreline when a bit of movement caught my eye.

A small seal pup lay on a shoreline rock, tucked into a crease a foot or two above the high tide line. He was alone. He was very young, maybe about the length of my forearm, with enormous eyes and mottled fur not unlike a puppy's. We looked at each other briefly, and he rolled partly on his back, waving a flipper feebly.

The rules: you do not approach stranded wildlife. You do not touch them. You most especially do not feed them. There's a Marine Mammal Stranding Network that you can call, but good luck getting them to pay attention on the Saturday night of a holiday weekend.

wings2speak, good Alaska native that she is, has repeatedly cautioned us about getting too sentimental about wildlife. One of her favorite stories involves a seal that was rescued, nursed back to health, and released into the wild with great fanfare -- only to be almost immediately devoured by an orca. There will be 1500 seal pups this year in this area alone, we've been told. Many of them won't survive.

Fine. Darwinian selection in action. All well and good, but that doesn't make it easier to watch a seal pup dying by inches in your back yard.

My mother called the wildlife people. Check back tomorrow, they said.

By morning the seal pup was still alive, weaker but still moving. That was the good news. The bad news was that the eagles had noticed him. The neighbor's son began a hopeless effort to chase them off.

My mother called the wildlife people again. The neighbors called the wildlife people again. Often. Loudly.

Squeaky wheels get grease: the wildlife people showed up around noon, collected the little guy, and whisked him away.

No word on whether they'll be able to keep him alive. He was exposed and unfed for about 36 hours, far too young to be separated from his mother, and possibly wounded himself into the bargain. Still: just getting him out from under the hungry eyes of the eagles was worth something. Though possibly not to the eagles.

It's not that Seattle people are, by nature, weather wimps. Actually most people in Seattle are reasonably inured to rain, wind, hail, occasional snow, and all of the other joys that come of living in a northern coastal climate. We like to bitch about it, but who doesn't?

Our real problem is temperature extremes.

35 degrees: Freezing. Also, it's probably raining, which means you feel twice as cold as you would otherwise.

92 degrees: OHMYGODITSTOOHOT.

Cut us some slack. Here's the default forecast for most of the year: highs in the 50s, lows in the 40s, mostly cloudy with occasional sunbreaks. After you've lived in that for awhile, you forget what it's like to live in more varied climes.

An example: about a year ago I went back east for a trip to Baltimore and the DC area. The first day I was there, a warmish day -- low 90s, maybe -- I went to the National Zoo in DC. I spent two, maybe three hours walking around outside and came perilously close to giving myself heat stroke. By the time I staggered into a little French bistro in DuPont Circle for lunch, I was sweating rivers, dizzy, and not a little out of it. The waitress took pity on me and fed me nearly an entire pitcher of water before asking me what I wanted to eat.

Mind you, I lived on the eastern seaboard reasonably happily for eleven years, and lived in a desert for ten years before that. I'm used to heat. Or I was, once.

Sometimes the place you live changes you more than you'd think.

One of the minor perqs of having worked here too damn long is that I get an office with a view. Specifically, a view of the Cascades.

Except this afternoon. It's a bright, sunny day. This morning the mountains looked close enough to reach out and touch. Now there's a thick haze, like a bad smog day in Los Angeles, and you can't see a damn thing more than about two miles away.

Hm.

Wonder if Mount St. Helens is belching again?

*google google*

Doesn't look like it, but...

I'm not the gardener in the family.

That's my mother. When I was growing up, she and my step-dad would spend weekend after weekend working outside in the yard. They thought nothing of laying out 150 bags of mulch in a single Saturday. Fortunately, they never made me help.

I never had any interest in gardening, but that changed after we bought a house. It has a small yard, front and back. When we bought the place, the front yard was barely passable, and the back yard was an ungodly jungle that hadn't been maintained in at least ten years. Both were beyond ugly.

Since I knew crap about yard work, Mom very kindly came down one weekend and helped me put the front yard back into commission. After that, every now and then when I have a free weekend, I spend it working on the yard. So today, I spent the whole day playing Farmer Bob. All I needed was a hat and a piece of straw to chew on.

Still, I got some ground cover installed, and a new fuschia, and replaced a hanging plant that didn't survive the winter. I spread a whole bunch of dirt, fertilizer and mulch, cleaned off the entire driveway and patio with a pressure washer, and now my back feels like I just did a four hour weightlifting gig.

The back yard is beyond any help that I can give it, at least at the moment. Not only was it a complete disaster, but it's three and a half stories below the front yard - meaning that any time you need to haul equipment in or haul dead stuff out, you're climbing three flights of stairs. We've been slowly having professionals work on it ever since we've moved in. We had to replace the staircase, replace the retaining wall that held the yard in place, pull out a half-assed concrete pallet that somebody had installed a few years ago and left to become completely covered with moss, and yank out enough weeds to fill a garbage truck twice over. Soon, I hope, we'll actually have a yard that I'd be willing to let people into without fear of lawsuits.

Which will then leave me with carting mulch, dirt, fertilizer and weeds up and down three flights of stairs. Oh well. I need the exercise anyway.