Member Tom Churchill will be presenting his popular series on the Cosmos, beginning on Sunday, January 10, 7:00 p.m. at the clubhouse. Read the handout (in PDF format). (Posted 12/26/10.)
All members should be aware of the information contained in the Shelter Bay Resident Handbook (in pdf format). A link may also be found on the Owner's Info page (Revised 1/10/10.)
Please
see the Shelter Bay News
Archive for news items previously posted here and still of
interest but no longer timely. (Revised 7/13/09.)
Upcoming Events:
hits on the Shelter Bay homepage since January 1, 2010.
Shelter Bay Drive, between Pioneer Parkway and First Street, will be closed for the better part of the day for road repairs by Puget Sound Energy. Traffic will be detoured, and residents will be able to get in and out of Shelter Bay via First Street, off Snee-Oosh Rd.
February 14 —Monsters, the Big Bang & the End of Time— This presentation will begin with the way cosmic distances are measured since we will be peering back in time and space to shortly after the Big Bang. On the way, we will look at debris clouds and shock waves that are remnants of expanding fireballs of very large star explosions. Our attention will then shift to the unseen but extraordinarily dangerous nuclei of these legacies: pulsars (neutron stars) and black holes. We will learn that both are so massive and so compact their ponderous gravities draw swirling disks of gas and dust that encircle them like vicious whirlpools of doom. We will find that these disks often glow with such unimaginable brilliance they outshine entire galaxies and are visible across the Universe. We will further find that these disks also feed their insatiable monsters with material the monsters in turn use to form death-ray beams that extend across galaxies. Taking a deep breath, we will next shift our attention to enigmatic dark matter and how it consolidates visible matter enabling galaxy formation. From here, we will consider what happened during and after the Big Bang which was the primordial source of everything: space, time, matter and energy. We will trace the progress of the Universe as it has expanded since the Big Bang, first forming matter, then stars, then galaxies, and then, unbelievably, discovered just recently, accelerating its expansion (driven by dark energy) so that beyond the extremes of the Universe we can see, space is hurtling away from us in all directions faster than light can travel. This means, if we could be around long enough to be witnesses, we would see more and more distant galaxies wink out of sight, lost forever. Knowing what we now know, we will consider the probable fate of the Universe and everything in it. The presentation and this series will be concluded with a list of the reasons why we all have won the most phenomenal, the most impossible of all lotteries. The image is an illustration superposed upon a nebula depicting a gamma-ray burst death ray that squarely struck Earth on March 19, 2008 and which, had it occurred in our galaxy instead of one far, far away, would have ended all life on Earth.
Earth-Directed Gamma Ray Burst of 3/19/08 — credit: SWIFT, NASA
It’s time to plan to plant! Skagit Beat the Heat is sponsoring a 5-part gardening series: “Eat Your Yard”. Series is free with no registration required.
Why buy food that’s expensive, bred for long-distance transport rather than nutrition, exposed to pesticides and dependent on fossil fuels to get it to our tables? Resolve to eat healthier, better-tasting, sustainably produced food this year by growing your own.
Series is held at the Anacortes Library in the evenings from 6:45 to 8:15 p.m. and includes the following:
January 19:
How to Set Up Your Vegetable Garden: How to Choose the Site, Create Beds, and Ready Them for Planting. Ruth Sutton, WSU Skagit County Extension Master Gardener and coordinator of the vegetable garden at the MG Discovery Garden on Memorial Highway.
January 26:
Best Veggie Choices for Skagit County: What’s Easy, Tasty, and Useful in Our Climate. Julieanne Ash of Farm to Market Organics, a CSA on half an acre in the Skagit Valley supplying 10 families.
February 2:
When to Start Seeds & When to Plant Out: How to Start Seeds and Keep Them Healthy, What to Buy as Transplants, and Best Seeding and Planting Out Dates for Our Area. Blair McHenry of Dominion Organics, Ferndale, consultant to the organic industry with a specialization in organic greenhouse vegetable production.
February 9:
How to Care for Your Vegetable Garden: Ongoing Maintenance, Including When and How Best to Fertilize, Irrigate, and Harvest. Bradley Smith, WSU Skagit County Extension Master Gardener and owner/grower at Samish Heirloom Farms, Sedro-Woolley.
February 16:
Problem Solving in the Vegetable Garden: What Common Problems Look Like and How to Avoid Them. Dr. Carol Miles, Vegetable Extension Specialist, WSU, specializing in organic vegetable production.
(Look for future articles in the Newsletter and on this website related to
making this a healthier planet.)
To contact
Shelter Bay board members, committee chairmen, executive secretary,
community manager, or maintenance, see the "Contact
Us"
link. There, you will see names, phone numbers, and email links. To
send an email to the board, or a member of the board, use board@shelterbay.net. For others, simply click on the email link of the person you want to
contact, and type your message.
Also, if you
click on the Administration navigation tab you will see a link to the
Committees page, which will show meeting times, the responsibilities of
the committee, and the names and phone numbers of committee members.
We hope you'll
find this site both easy to use, informative and improving over time.
Our goal is to try to provide the most current information about
Shelter Bay and La Conner for residents and others who are interested
in the area.
