Author: Susan

Farmers Market Flowers!

Now that we have the fruits and veggies from the CSA each week, I haven’t been to the farmers’ market once this summer. On the balance, I’m fine with that, but I do miss all of the flower vendors, and I’ve been wishing for sunflowers. I spent about five hours yesterday working on caulking the trim in the family room. As I worked, I listened to all of the cheers and honking for the Breast Cancer 3 Day Walk, which headed past the top of our street. As the day got late, I decided to run up the street to pick up white thread for Kevin’s curtains and see all of the walkers (aka, do a little honking myself) – many of them get dressed up in things ranging from “outfits” to complete costumes. I actually found it quite emotional to see their progress – most of them are either survivors, or friends and family of people who have had cancer. I know several people this year with horrible, sad cancer stories, and this walk seems like such a brave and hopeful thing to go do (you can’t walk without a hitting a minimum pledge – it’s not little, and it’s a big physical and time commitment), and at the same time each walker is so small in the face of the dollars and years that are required for improvements in care, let alone a cure. You see all of the PINK, and the friends, and the brave T-shirt slogans (“I had a war in my raq.”), and it was a steady stream of women and supporting men and sons, but it still made me kind of teary to drive by. Very emotional and powerful.

On the way to the thread store, I drove by a woman with a tent selling flowers along the way, and I stopped and bought these.

They’re so extravagant, and exactly what I’ve been feeling we were lacking. The right flowers to be summery, but heading into fall colors. Perfect. 🙂

The weather has been cooperating with brilliant sunshine, so our kitchen was full of glowing flowers and bright sunlight all afternoon.

We’ve been hoping to replace the kitchen cabinets since we moved in. (We have a hole where a trash compactor used to go, and none of the current cabinets are adjustible, so they’re a terrible use of space. We still have glasses in storage. Plus there’s a mid-eighties-era microwave/oven that you can see in the photo above that would make an excellent pantry if we redid things.)

Do any of you live in Seattle or on the Eastside and have custom cabinetry recommendations? We’ll definitely scope out the Lowes/Home Depot standard options, but we’re hoping to keep the current Corian countertops and the kitchen as it is just doesn’t fit the standard grid. Any thoughts (including keywords to search for online) would be awesome.

P.S. If you know an electrician, we’re in the market for one of those, too. 🙂

Almost there!

I’ve been working like mad on all of the quilting for the daybed quilt, recently.

I’m definitely clear that I’d never do quilting on more than a twin quilt on my home machine – it’s rather unmanageable.

That said, this pattern is basically optimal for it – all straight lines and angular. It took a little while for me to figure out a quilting pattern that was relatively symmetrical itself but still accentuated the top, with the non-uniform different squares. I’m really pleased with the design I settled on, and it was a pretty simple thing to quilt. Here’s a sketch (red is the pieced pattern, blue is the quilting):

Now I have to cut trim, sew it on, and them hem the second edge by hand. Getting close!

Hiking at Mount Rainier

In August, Larry had been trying to organize us all for a day hike to see the wildflowers at Paradise (on Mount Rainier). Kevin and I waited too long to be start getting enthusiastic, and Larry decided it wasn’t a good weekend. This week, he tried again (with a very reasonable 10 am leaving time), so Kevin and I jumped aboard enthusiastically. Well worth it. It was quite cloudy when we arrived, but every now and then, the glacier peeked through in extremely dramatic fashion.

There were slight calibration issues – Larry had proposed a “picnic” and “bringing up a bottle of wine” to share, and “looking at the wildflowers”. So Kevin and I hemmed and hawed before choosing hiking boots over sneakers, and packed supplies including a cutting board, crackers, lots of cheese in a soft cooler bag, a picnic blanket, etc. We all climbed a quarter mile of rock steps up from the parking lot to the main trail, then over a ways to this stunning waterfall.

I was still feeling quite enchanted, but then Larry pointed out the real trail and I realized that perhaps I hadn’t understood his “wine and cheese” concept correctly. This is a poor picture of me climbing switchbacks, but I find it gratifying since you can see how steep the hill was.

(Larry ran the switchbacks, and occasionally cried out things like “hoo-yah!!”. Such glee, whereas I’ve always only been a peer-pressured hiker.) Similarly, here I am concentrating my way across a slippery snow field.

You can see Sanna (yellow shirt) and Shawn’s shoulders behind me. (Also, behind all of us, you can see the grey and red martian rock. Never forget that Rainier’s a volcano.)

Despite the unfortunate shock of both elevation gain (1700 ft) and distance (5.5 miles roundtrip, plus the preliminary hike up from the car), the Panorama Point hike was gorgeous, both as we walked and whenever we stopped. The wildflowers were great. We saw tons of lupine (both purple/blue and a cream version), magenta paintbrush, several kinds of alpine lilies and daisies, something that looked similar to queen anne’s lace, heather, and many unidentified pretty things.

The views were amazing. We could see Mount Hood (especially later in the day) and there were several contenders for Mount St. Helens, but I’m not sure which one it actually was. Here are Shawn and Sanna posing against the mountain backdrop.

And me and Kevin with the glacier behind us.

And Larry in his element.

On the way down, things just kept getting prettier as the air cleared and then got more golden. Here’s Kevin with the Nisqually Glacier.

It’s so sensational and enormous and yet is apparently a shadow of what it was even a few years ago, as the glaciers here melt.

In terms of wildlife, there were surprisingly few birds and insects, but we were gratified to see MANY mammals. Our first fun siting was the marmots. Think of something about raccoon-size but that looks like a prairie dog. They were exceptionally chubby and munching away on plants, which seemed counterintuitive until I noticed that the lupine produces a fuzzy bean-like pod which I’m sure has lots of protein and fat for them. Here’s Kevin on the hike up, and a marmot looking out from the rock above him.

Then we saw a mountain goat! He was lying in a snowfield, so the pictures didn’t come out a bit, but this description of goats in the park has a picture. There were many very bold chipmunks – about three times the size I am used to so it must be a different creature even though they looked the same?? On the way down, we saw four deer! This guy had antlers:

And we’d just arrived back at our car and were stretching and (blissfully) removing hiking boots, when this guy came scavenging around!

He looked like a black fox with a white-tipped tail, and was utterly fearless as he checked things out.

We got back to the car about 7:30, and home for the night right around 10. It was a fun, interesting, conversational ride home despite the dark – I love driving new routes with Kevin. Sanna posted her pictures here, and my full flickr album is here (both have photos with comments). A great way to spend twelve hours, thanks to Larry! 🙂

Labour Day Weekend: Sunset

Labour Day Weekend was mostly surprisingly cold. The general Seattle reaction seems to be a little bit of grief for the summer that we feel like we never had. But it stopped raining, got a bit sunny, and climbed into the lower-sixties on Sunday and so we jumped at the invitation to go grill on Shawn and Sanna’s roof. They live in South Lake Union, and there are great views of the Space Needle …

… and all the way around to Gas Works Park. The rooftop garden and grill area is great. Here’s Capital Hill across Lake Union, with a seaplane about to land.

(See it? Look just to the lower-right of the six white smokestacks in the middle of the photo.) Shawn and Sanna are farmers’ market mavens, and they had prepped a feast. Lots of purple vegetables (including Dragon’s Tongue beans – if you ever find these, buy them! They’re awesome.), delicious potatoes and sausages.

The clouds were amazing — tall and spectacular (I wish I knew my cloud types?), and once the sun began to set at a too-early 7:20, they became increasingly dramatic.

And then even more so:

The roof is great because it’s planted with gardens and people bring their dogs up. Very social. Once the sun was officially down, we needed to make a run to the apartment for blankets and more sweatshirts, but better staying up there in the twilight and prettyness than heading inside!

And now we’re committed

We have two bathrooms – one off of the master bedroom that was beautifully renovated by the previous owners, and one off of the main hallway that serves as a main/guest bath. Here’s the view from the tub mere moments before I took a drill and removed the medicine cabinet and above-toilet cabinet.

Now we have a big hole in the wall and an unpainted patch of drywall, respectively.

Our plans are to replace the vanity with something a bit more sleek and modern, replace the mirror with something a bit more proportionate, paint the walls (after repairing a slew of holes, dents and major scrapes), put in a new medicine cabinet (Kevin bought one today that’s perfect!!), and get someone to resurface the tub. (We’d been looking to do one of those tub liners, but the more research I did, especially with the Better Business Bureau, the more leery I felt. Since the tub’s scratches are all superficial and the tile is in good shape (I just don’t like the color) resurfacing looks like a good option, and about a fifth of the price.)

We’re planning to leave the floor, toilet and trim alone. Not to jinx things, but right now, it’s looking like we’ll be able to make the changes we want for just under $2000 – not bad for a bathroom remodel.

We have ice, valves, and one orange tomato!

We had a plumber in two weeks ago to run a new line to our ice machine. The line that came with the house used a saddle valve (which is apparently tantamount to begging for a gushing leak in the crawl space AND they’re illegal in our town). The poor guy had to go down in the crawl space, dig through our new insulation and resolder our pipes in the cramped dark. Plumber rates are impressively expensive, but better him than me!

I’ve been delaying this post, for fear of sudden leaks. But, we have ice!!!

We’ve been making our own ice cubes since October. I’d sort of gotten used to the inconvenience of it, but I can’t tell you what a treat it is to have a full tray of ice. We had four ice cube trays before, and they’re all washed and away in the upper cabinet. (I’m keeping them in case I decide to make mini popsicles, or raspberry-mint ice cubes, or some other rare and unlikely delicacy. You never know.)

The other very exciting thing is that there’s now a shutoff valve for the ice maker water line under our sink!!

(It’s the bottom-right.) The plumber also told me what the three existing shutoff valves do, which is useful knowledge. I wrote it on an index card that’s now tied under the sink so I don’t even have to think if I need it. Having experienced an ice machine line failing, I am VERY happy to know how to kill the water if need be. 🙂

Yay, modern conveniences!!

In other news, we’re a few days away from our first ripe tomato!

In addition, on the last day of August, there are about 5 other green tomatoes, and around a dozen green cherry tomatoes. Wow, the weather didn’t work for tomatoes this year. (Though you can tell it’s been raining here – the grass went from semi-scorched to fluorescent green). I suppose it makes sense, since I didn’t get them in until the last week of June (the temperature wasn’t consistently above 50 at night until then). The tomatoes are Early Girl, but you wouldn’t expect fruit in less than two months anyway, and we’ve had our fair share of cool and cloudy this summer. I’m excited about that one fruit though – we’ll savour it, regardless of what the rest of the green dudes end up being.

RIP, wonderful monitor

I have always been a bit of a hoarder – someone who forms emotional attachments to things that I own. In one of the spheres that this makes the least sense (technology), I cling even more strongly and keep things well beyond their shelf date. Probably not an uncommon flaw. My ’92 walkman was in constant use until ’03. My ’95 stereo (with dual cassette, 3 cd changer, and am-fm radio) is still sitting in our dining room, much to Kevin’s chagrin.

My parents gave me a monitor for my 21st birthday. That sentence is so blasé, but the import to me at the time was enormous. It was an affirmation for me of how proud my parents were of my impending college degree, and a recognition of how much time I spent working in front of the computer . I was just coming off of a Microsoft internship and starting my senior year as a computer science major. Kevin (who I’d just barely started dating) was jealous. Having something at the leading edge was a deep thrill. Plus (and I cannot overstate how cool this was) – I was so happy not to heft my 19″ CRT up three flights of stairs to my dorm room. Yay, LCD!!! There’s something to be said for hauling crates of textbooks and treating the feather light computer as the bonus round.

Six years later, though, especially given how frequently I work at home, I’m ready for more screen real estate. I’ve been clinging to my 17″ LCD because I love it, but something finally clicked in the sensible portion of my brain two weeks ago and I’m ready for much, much bigger.

Here’s the old, wonderful 17″ monitor:

Here are the two side-by-side.

Note how tiny the 17″ screen is (despite the larger frame). Crazy. And here’s the new monitor, displaying side-by-side word docs with plenty of space to spare.

WOW. How very cool. And Kevin keeps coming into my room and exhaling in wistful, covetous sighs…Yay for still occasionally being the one to up the technological ante.

We do not want for pine trees

The sunset a week ago was sensational and golden – the light hummed.

Pictures are a meager reminder, but pretty enough to post. From the driveway, looking west across the cul de sac:

And looking north up the street:

I love our house, neighbourhood, and proximity to everything (especially work), but every time I try to take pictures of the sky I understand why I sometimes feel so hemmed in here. Quite the change from our apartment up on the hill overlooking the lake. Generally it just feels cozy, but man are those trees tall.

We’re faced with a particular challenge regarding the trees now that football season is nigh. We’ve been essentially living without a TV since we moved in, mid-October. We have internet and cable through Comcast. No love lost there, both for endless billing snafus and general quality of service. In our old apartment, Kevin actually bought an HD antenna and connected it straight to his computer, and we used Media Center piped through to the TV to watch our shows on the networks in HD. No ESPN or Fox Sports, but otherwise everything that we wanted. Meanwhile, we kept calling Comcast to cancel our cable tv altogether, and they’d give us a six-month package analog cable package that was cheaper than internet alone. So we went from a $125/month cable+internet package to a $50 analog-tv+internet package. Nice.

When we moved to our new house and for the first four months, our TV room was in total disarray – no walls, the storage dumping-ground of the house, etc. The TV was occasionally plugged in, but we found that when the TV was connected our precious internet was spotty. (I may have some of these details wrong – Kevin is the wiring expert – but this is the gist of the situation.) The Comcast guys came out to test the line into the house, which seems to be functioning perfectly, so it’s likely the house wiring that’s the problem. Kevin did some analysis and there were several splitters (which degrade signal strength), plus signal gets weaker over longer lines, plus he suspects that the coax cables that run through the house are damaged/inferior. Back in March or so, Kevin unscrewed the TV connection where it entered the house to boost our all-important internet stability. So no TV until we reconnected for the Olympics, and now we’re mere moments away from football and needing a solution. Kevin just bought a spool of coax cable, and he’s been researching roof-mounted HD antennas which he could wire down to the utility closet that holds all of the house networking. My understanding is that the cable could go to the closet, which connects to his computer via the cable he ran last winter, which connects back through the closet to the XBOX 360 (a Media Center Extender) and so we could watch TV in the family room. (I sometimes feel like I should make an effort to understand this better, but he’s so good at it that I just trust his judgment and wait for the TV to turn on.)

The only hitch in the plan is that we are surrounded by enormous trees. Kevin bought a compass (on sale at REI!) and spent a good while up on the roof scoping out the visibility in the appropriate directions. It *might* work. We also had a tree guy out to give us estimates for removing some of the behemoths around the house, so that also might help further the plan. (In terms of feeling hemmed in, I felt very justified by his evaluation – our trees are between 65 and 100 feet tall. Wow!) We’re a bit conflicted about priorities for tree removal . We can only take out four per calendar year, so which goes first? The ones that block the southern sun? The ones dumping pine needles onto the roof? The ones preventing football happiness? We should get quotes back in the next few days, which should help narrow the options considerably. 🙂

Fish tank lights!

When we switched to the Amanda-and-Brian lights for our tank, our old light stand no longer worked. This has many repercussions – it’s harder to do daily maintenance and cleaning on the tank, airflow suffers so the lights heat up more than they would if they were lofted (and the water below them heats up more, too), and the water in the tank doesn’t oxygenate as well because there’s less airflow over the surface. Also, while Kevin was able to get one of the light fans to work, the other one seems to be shorted out, and probably not worth fixing. This shortens the life of the bulb and raises the temp of the fixture.

I’ve been trying for the last two months to find prefabricated stands that would support the lights above the water, to no avail. The light brand is Finnex – totally unheard of by google, except for integrated systems (where you buy the tank, stand, lights, filtration, etc as a package). The Finnex lights that we have present a single dock in the middle of each end to anchor a stand, but are completely incompatible with any of the other commercial lights’ stands on the market today. After many hopeful internet and store-based searches, I finally decided to craft a homemade solution.

I decided to use wood as the pedestal to support a metal brace at each end of each light. Experimenting in the hardware aisle, I found that 1½ door hinges fit perfectly into the light braces. I also found that two ¾” x ½” corner braces per wood pedestal would support it along the top of the tank.
Kevin used the Sawzall to cut the steel into sections according to my measurements. Then, for the first time really, I used the drill for a long series of assembly. (Usually the heavy power drill is Kevin’s – it was a good confidence boost to learn to use it over the course of this project.)
For both lights, the entire lift system required 32 screws, into hard to balance 1″x1″x2.5″ wood blocks. My first version was too tall, and the lights cast too much against the wall and not enough into the water.

I spent a while unscrewing fixtures, cutting down blocks by an inch, and then rescrewing.

Here’s the inspired door-hinge solution in action.

The hinge slips through the channel at the end of the light, and then I used plastic zip ties to cinch in the two ends of the hinge around the steel support.

There are many advantages – it’s stable, you can slide the light front-to-back, and if we need to remove the light from the support it’s a quick scissor cut and then cheap and simple to replace.

Once I was happy with the height, I whipped out the sewing machine to create black shields for the front of the tank to block the light in the gap. After a little bit of experimentation, I filled them with poster board. This was a dumb decision, since paper will be brought down by salt water evaporation. How stupid of me. When these wilt, as they inevitably will, I’ll replace the paper filling with felt. In any case, the fabric shades are attached to the wooden posts with adhesive velcro tabs.

The weather has calmed down a bit since I set up this system, but still: way fewer/less-dramatic temp spikes in the tank due to better airflow, and a reduction of algae during hot periods. A success already. 🙂