In this three-week course, we will look at the relationships between living beings in local forests, focusing on the interrelationships between trees and the tiny organisms that help the forest thrive: mosses, lichens, and fungi. Jane will illustrate the sessions with photographs she has taken in her years of hiking the forest lands.

Instructor: Jane Billinghurst

Jane is a writer, editor, and translator who works with non-fiction natural history books. After translating The Hidden Life of Trees by German forester Peter Wohlleben, she embarked on her own voyage of discovery into local forest ecosystems. She has called Anacortes home for the past twenty years and spends as many hours as she can out in forests looking for amazing and often-overlooked treasures under the trees.

Writing about your life can seem like a daunting task. Where to begin? This class will prime the pump, with weekly writing assignments (about 750 words) presented in themes, plus writing tips. Sharing your stories confidentially with others in class will inspire you even more. You'll come to see your life through a different lens and leave a legacy for your family.

(Class size is limited to 10 students.)

 Instructor: Teru Lundsten

Teru has been teaching memoir writing in Skagit County since 2010. She worked as a personal historian, helping people preserve their life stories into books for their families. As a journalist she wrote over 200 profiles of people of all ages and from around the world. She has completed a memoir of her early years.

Join us to learn how to protect yourself and your loved ones from financial fraud! Learn the most common financial scams, new fraud trends on how criminals are using technology to access private data, and the actions you can take to rebuild if you fall victim to fraud.

You will also hear stories from Anacortes citizens who have been impacted by financial fraud.

The U.S. Office of Justice reports that financial fraud is the number one crime committed against seniors in the U.S. Additionally, in 2022 the National Council on Aging reported more than 88,000 complaints of fraud, resulting in more than $3 billion in losses from people 60. Don’t be a statistic!

Instructor: Racheal Meloche, MS

Racheal is Vice President and Community Bank Manager at Banner Bank in Anacortes. She will be joined in instruction by additional Banner Bank staff.

Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Vittorio de Sica, Yasujiro Ozu, Ingmar Bergman, and Francois Truffaut each broke new ground in cinema, and we will see how they accomplished that. Each week, I will introduce the feature (or double feature) before screening it without interruption. We will have a brief discussion following each movie. 

1. “Sherlock Jr.,” Keaton, 1924, and “The Circus,” Chaplin, 1928, U.S.
2. “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” Hitchcock, 1935, U.K.
3. “The Bicycle Thief,” de Sica, 1948, Italy
4. “Tokyo Story,” Ozu, 1953, Japan
5. “The Seventh Seal,” Bergman, 1957, Sweden
6. “The 400 Blows,” Truffaut, 1959, France

Please note: Weeks 1 and 4 will run an extra half-hour, from 4pm to 6:30pm, due to longer run-times. Weeks 2, 3, 5, and 6 will be from 4pm to 6pm, the usual ASC schedule. 

Instructor: Mark Lundsten

I made my first movie “Night of the Guano,” a documentary about avoiding seabird bycatch, in 1997, during my career as a commercial halibut fisherman in Alaska. After retiring from fishing, I made a few more films. My last one, “The Bath,” played in film festivals and received a few awards. See FidalgoFilms to see those movies.

This course is based on the book "Charge and the Energy Body: The Vital Key to Healing Your Life, Your Chakras, and Your Relationships" by Anodea Judith.

This class will continue to explore and deepen your level of self-understanding and responsibility for charging and discharging of your vital force. It will help you to understand your own workings, the forces that propel those you love and how to stabilize and harmonize the energies within you and beyond you. It will awaken you to higher dimensions of self-expression, self-healing and creativity.

There is no prerequisite for this class. If you have taken 101 it will enhance your exploration and deepen your understanding of the chakras and their functions.

Learn conductivity and healing exercises to transform emotionally reactive habit patterns to responsive action, thereby freeing you from limitations of self-expression.

Guided experiential exercises will be used, including meditation, breath and yoga to enhance the functions of body/emotion/mind & breath, which will lead you to a better understanding of yourself in relationship to your Life, Love & Light Force.

Instructor: Henny Nouwen, RN, LMT

Henny started learning about and experimenting with the unseen realms of energy awareness, auras, chakras, energy medicine, bodywork as well as metaphysics and mysticism in the 80’s. She has been in private practice for 32 years using healing touch, intuition, insight and wisdom as an Integrative Healer.

Henny brings with her 18 years as a cardiovascular circulating nurse in open heart surgery as well as having been an ordained minister in metaphysical teachings for nine years. Over 40 years Henny has taught a multitude of classes on the mind/body connections, death, grief & loss, energy awareness and healing. Henny is driven to share her knowledge of how true healing happens in the recognition of the greater reality that sources our energetic being and teach you how to get in touch with it.

Basic genealogical research principles will be described. Genealogical rules will be presented, and help will be provided to know what to believe and what deserves skepticism. The principles and methods for genealogical research with DNA will also be discussed by the instructor.

If you are serious about genealogy, you must have your DNA sequenced. The rules have recently changed—you must have your DNA sequenced at Ancestry (they no longer allow DNA sequence uploads from other vendors).

This is a workshop—identify problems in your ancestry to work on. Bring a basic (paper) pedigree—4 to 6 generations with as much data as possible on birth, death, and marriages.

Instructor: Dick Tolman

R. L. Tolman is a twice-retired medicinal scientist (Ph.D., University of Utah in bio-organic chemistry--specialty DNA) with a consuming interest in history and genealogy; an experienced teacher, lecturer, and writer (120 refereed scientific publications). He won the National Genealogical Society’s Best Family History Competition in 2006 and has published articles in The Register (New England Historic Genealogical Society), Crossroads (Utah Genealogical Society) and Nevada in the West (Nevada Historical Society). He has been a volunteer at the Nevada Historical Society, a Family History instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College/Reno and at the Anacortes (WA) Senior College. He maintains the website, 29DeadPeople, https://29deadpeople.com, a site for sourced genealogical essays. He is a pro bono genealogical researcher and prefers to work on impossible problems and those that have been published in error.

Welcome to Anthropological Genetics

“In diversity there is beauty and there is strength” (Maya Angelou).  “Diversity is the engine for culture” (Robert Redford).  “Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences” (Gorbachev).  “By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and culture, progress weakens life and favors death” (Octavio Paz).  Without diversity among and between human populations we cannot adapt, evolve and survive.\

Survival is found in the ongoing dance of genetics, culture, and environment.  Here we are learning the steps of that dance.  Genes may control our sensitivity, flexibility, and capacity to respond to different environments, but environmental factors themselves actually cause great variation of gene expression.  We recognize that environmental effects modified traits in human diversity through varying generational exposures. Those modifications are sex-specific and vulnerable to the timing of exposure.

Today’s human phenotypes represent the sum of many gene- by-environmental interactions over the life-course and increasingly complex interventions stimulated by modernization. These interventions looked like a good idea at the time.  However, research now identifies many of their effects as problematic to the health of following generations. We will discuss today’s diversity in populations and how understanding that is so important.

Instructor: MJ Mosher

MJ blends experience from diverse professional careers. She served as a clinical nurse in Denver, as a researcher through a Postdoctoral Fellowship at National Heart,Lung and Blood Institute, University of North Carolina, and as a professor in anthropological genetics and nutrition at Western Washington University. She served as principal investigator in population studies with the Buryat of Siberia and Mennonite of Central Kansas, and additionally participating in studies with the Russian Old Believers in Oregon and indigenous populations of the Amazonian region of northern Peru.

All studies examined the relationships among diet, genetics/epigenetics and biomarkers of energy balance, obesity, and cholesterol. MJ believes that teaching is a two-way experience, with teacher and students (or study participants) learning from each other.

Come join a "Janeite" to explore the wit, wisdom of human nature of Jane Austen. Her characters act within the context and family of Regency (1811-1820) England. The themes are timeless: family, social class, community and love. The need to marry is a preoccupation with Jane’s characters. Why do they do it: necessity, security, status or love?

Persuasion is Jane Austen’s last and shortest novel. The heroine, Anne Elliot (27 years old) is still suffering from a love lost 8 years ago due to a persuasive argument against it. Now that lost love reappears. A great deal of persuasion is needed by all parties.

Persuasion: The action of persuading or seeking to persuade; presenting of inducements or winning arguments to a person to induce him to do or believe something. OED definition **Jane-ite: an enthusiastic fan or devotee of the works of Jane Austen. Coined in 1890 by literary critic George Sainsbury.

Prior to the course, the instructor encourages you to read the book or at least look at one of the several film versions.

Instructor: Susan Guterbock

Susan is a dual national-US and UK. Grew up in the east bay area of San Francisco and went to UC Berkeley from 1964-68 (exciting times). She was introduced to Jane Austen by her English mother. She is an avid reader and when she becomes unsure about what to read, she returns to JA. JA continues to delight Susan with her astute observations of human nature and portrayals of people from all classes of society.

In 2017 Susan and three friends (two of whom are "Janeites") went on our own self-guided tour of the places in Jane Austen’s life. We went to Lyme Regis (mentioned big time in Persuasion) and none of us fell off The Cobb.