My birthday has come and gone, but I've still not blogged about it!  I was saddned when I thought I would have no photos to share on here since my digital camera seemed broken.  Thankfully, I was able to obtain these photos taken with a disposable camera so all is not lost.  Forgive me for how late I am on giving an update, but I hope you enjoy the next few blogs I intend to sit down and complete.

April Fool's Day just so happens to be the same day every year that everyone makes an annual celebration of my arrival  that occured all the way back in 1983.  I'm suprised to say that I've lived long enough to go through so many birthdays. There are a few I will never forget. One is when I was only 3 years old. That year I remember getting a really awesome yellow dumpster truck and also a piggy bank that a cousin had given me. Just as soon as I unwrapped that piggy bank and passed it around for other to see, it found an unfortunate fate of slipping through the clumsy fingers of one guest and smashing to the ground.  I cried, but  a smashed piggy wasn't the worst of it.  When my mom brought out the the Smurf birthday cake I was so excited to get, she found that the store sold here a cake that was so stale she couldn't put a knife ot it!  She had to take my cake back, demand a refund, and get me a generic cake to serve to our family and friends.  I'll never forget this event, and I think I'll always laugh about that rock solid cake.

This 27th birthday is going to be remembered just as well as my 3rd. It was a birthday of firsts. The first reason isn't very good because it's the first one without Mom. I missed not hearing a call from her singing Happy Birthday, talking about the day I was born, and how young I still am. I miss her so much! Yet for happier reasons,  I'll also remember this birthday because it was my first one spent at the beach, and I also went razor clam digging for the first time as well.

We started out in the early hours to reach the beach in time for the minus tide and found the clams were easily spotted all over the beach.  We were all looking for these small mounds around the diameter of a quarter.  Whenever one found a mound, we'd yell out for the clam gun and start digging. 

This is the first clam I dug up.  I couldn't believe how easy it was to get them!

This is the stance. You take the gun at an angle, your back to the ocean, and push down as far as necessary, and make sure to be careful not to damage the little guy.  

In the beginning, we were finding the clams all over. Yet as the tide made its way inward, it seemed like all the clams dug farther in the sand . So I spent some time walking out as far as I could to the edge of the Pacific.  As I stood there, the water kept creeeping slowly up my legs until it was well past my knees. In this picture you can't tell how far out the tide was, but it was really far.

Some of the clam digging crew: Avery, Meghann (who just had a b-day yesterday), and myself acting like I'm going to eat a raw clam.

After our fun at the beach, we decided to go out to Astoria, OR and climb the Astoria Column.  There are 164 steps we climbed to reach the top, but the view was well worth the effort.

On top of the Astoria Column, it's so beautiful.  I could see the Columbia emptying into the Pacific one one side, and beautiful Northwestern forests forever in every other direction.

Here I was back in July of '07. I was just a tourist seeing the sights.  I would have never thought I'd be a resident back then.

Remember the beautiful forests I was talking about? Here is just a portion of the sights on the Column.  on the horizon, you can see Saddle Back Mountain to your left. It's the highest 3 points in the horizon I could see.  

Later that evening, I learned how to clean and cook clams.  Altogether we counted 36 clams.  Avery found 10, Kyle and I found 9 a piece, and Meghann found 8.  Kyle gave me his since he hates clams, so I had 18! 

 Razor clams make for some good eattin' and don't take long to fry up either!