Author: Susan

Welcome, I suppose…

Well, we have a new dude in the tank. We took Kevin’s family to the fish store on their last day here. (To be fair, we merely suggested it as an activity and then they asked – we didn’t drag them.) Along with the typical late December purchases of new lights, more sand, and the hermit crab and snail cleaner crew, we brought home an emerald crab.

The upside to emerald crabs is that some people claim that they eat bubble algae (a constant nuisance, and we have plenty). On the other hand, many people say that they also eat corals, other crabs, and any rock-dwelling fish (like the gramma) that they can corner. I don’t doubt it – those claws are pretty big. But Kevin’s family was here, he loves them, and he promised to trap it and bring it back to the store at the first sign of problems, and so we came home with one.

Once in the tank, he promptly acted like a crab (ie, dissapeared into the rocks and became nocturnal). We’ve seen him a handful of times since.

See him? His green forearms and pinchers are hugging the top of the acro. (There’s also a brown shell of a hermit crab on the acro just under the tips of the crab’s claws, and the pointy purple shell of a medium-sized snail to the left.)

I’m still deeply distrustful, and Kevin’s disappointed that he isn’t more visible. New name: Green Monster? He’s certainly big enough…

That helps a bit

We decided to live it up and buy a second yard waste bin. Another 96-gallon bin costs $7 a month, and we have been rapidly realizing that unless we get seriously into vermiculture (something that has been researched, considered, and rejected), our single bin just will not cut it.

I’m so impressed by the yard waste and composting services provided for curbside pickup. ANY food product, plus pizza boxes, counts as compost and can be put in the yard waste bin (including meat, fish and dairy, which you generally can’t compost at home due to pests and odor). I’m slowly gaining the knack for stuffing yard waste bins to the hilt: start with leaves and pine needles, add tree limbs to the corners and then stuff and stamp down all of the random branches and clippings.

Our clipping piles are basically never going to disappear. I’ve started researching rental chippers, but they’re seeming like more trouble than they’re worth at this point. The ones that actually could fit in my car are called shredders, but they’re harder to find for rental and they only handle things up to 2”, and they are apparently crummy at dealing with pine needles (we have a million). 90% of our branches could be handled by a small chipper (up to three inches), but the units need to be towed home with a trailer hitch (can you picture adding that to the mustang??), and they’re too big to get through the gate, so we’d have to haul the entire huge piles out to the driveway, and then haul (presumably via a new wheelbarrow?) all of the wood chips/mulch back to the backyard.

So, the default plan for now is to just max out our two yard waste bins until it’s gone. The pile on the side of the house is my top priority, since I can’t even imagine what kind of creepy crawlies are finding homes between our limbs and the dirt they’re sitting on. Yard waste is collected every other week during the winter, so it may be a long haul. To get a sense of how much a yard waste bin holds, here’s the before

and after (that’s a six-foot fence):

A new quilt!

I am all excited about the daybed quilt. After more thinking, the goal was to have a pink and brown quilt that would coordinate between the daybed and the light pink walls, and improve the coherence of the rest of the room’s layout and furniture. Given the mission-style rails on the sideboards, straight lines seemed better than curves, squares, or diamonds. Stark and geometric lines, but smoothed by color. I didn’t want something with too much movement – lots of quilt designs have strong diagonal or top-to-bottom lines. And I love the log cabin pattern, and plan to do many more, but I feel like I shouldn’t get into a rut (the world is wide, might as well explore a bit). Again, here’s the shot of the space to fill:

Surprisingly little searching on the internet yielded the Hidden Wells quilt design -– perfect! There’s a great (long) tutorial here, a short cheat sheet here, and some awesome samples (plus this and this). I particularly liked the strip widths and the colors (a bold square, with a lighter shadow) in this one. I whipped out the pencil crayons to come up with a pattern,

calculated fabric in each of the colors (and then doubled them… anything I don’t use for the quilt can be put towards pillows), went to Joann Fabrics, and bought these.

There’s a conventional wisdom that you need at least one “ugly” print to make your quilt pop – to me, an annoying rule. I’m thinking that a mix of colors (dark brown, whites, pinks, and one red) plus different textures will do the trick. Time will tell.

Oh, 2007

I know that the new year is going to bring new things – my job sounds like it will be changing a good bit, some friends are leaving Seattle while others are returning, we have half a million house projects on the horizon – but I’m so sad to see 2007 go. And, for that matter, I still miss 2006. The last two years have seen a new career path for me, two new jobs for Kevin, one fishtank redesign, one fishtank move, a proposal, a wedding, a honeymoon, 6 trips to the east coast, 1 roadtrip to Wyoming, 4 visits by family, a slew of wonderful wedding gifts, two friends’ weddings, 3 house inspections, 2 offers, and 1 new home, a finished quilt, uncounted finished knitting projects, 4 babies born to friends and family, and many, many bunches of farmers market flowers. I’m reasonably confident that the new year will not jinx this fantastic roll, but it still makes me sad to bid farewell to 2007. I feel like there probably aren’t so many years in life that are this happy.

I don’t think I have any resolutions. There are certainly plans (to walk and bike to work instead of driving, to quilt, to plan the weeks’ worth of dinners on Sunday, to attend our 5th-year college reunions, to finish painting, to redo the kitchen in the fall, to replace windows, to replace light fixtures, …). But for the most part, I am happy and settled, and my projects don’t count as resolutions. I suppose if there’s anything to focus on, it’s taking time to mellow: to read fiction, to not be tied to the endless to-do list.

Here’s hoping that 2008 continues the trend of 2007.

More company!

Kevin’s family left, and then our good friends (who are moving to CA and needed a place to stay for a few days) came the next morning. Their baby and “our” puppy required 2-adult supervision. Neither was innocent: William kept knocking her over and getting way too excited, and just when we were about to side with the baby, she’d throw tupperware or toys at his head. I think they both genuinely liked each other, they just couldn’t figure out how to interact. Easiest when separated but still able to see each other!

William left today, which makes everything much, much easier.

Now we’re down to one cute little creature underfoot. Luckily, she’s mostly kept her distance from the fishtank and the tree, and is good about listening when it comes to staying out of cupboards full of glass jars or cleaning supplies. The pasta, can, and tupperware cabinets were deemed good play areas, though, and she’s been quite methodical about emptying them and handing off the contents to whoever else is nearby. Lots of “can you bring the bulger to Kevin?” or “ooh, a bag clip!”

Very cute and so fun to have them here.

Our puppy for a week

Our friends Shawn and Sanna (the ones who helped us move all of our furniture) were headed back to the east coast for Christmas, and so we got to puppy-sit their six month old cockapoo, William Wallace. He was surprisingly little work (especially while Kevin’s parents and sister were here to play with him, bring him outside, wipe off his feet, give him treats, etc…!), and though we had to remove the tinsel from the bottom branches of the tree, and listen to him cry when we wouldn’t let him help with the tree work, he’s been a great visitor.

He’s been very vigilant about chasing the wildlife outside. We have lots of flocks of tiny little birds (chickadees? Sparrows? I just got a bird book, so hopefully I’ll have a better report soon.), plus some enormous, fat squirrels. He didn’t bark, but you’d see him pointing at the door when he wanted to go out and run. Usually, whatever it was would scatter, and then he’d be stuck milling about, waiting for the next interesting creature.

He was all thwarted by the squirrels and their fence- and tree-climbing.

I don’t know which breed this comes from, but he’s an amazing jumper and pouncer. Any time we threw a toy for him, he’d conclude his run with an adorable, funny pounce. And we kept looking out into the back yard to see him running crazy puppy circles in which he’d clear the japanese maple (about a yard high and a yard and a half wide), or launch himself off of the top of the rockwork. Funny little dog!

(And since everyone has asked, we’re not getting a dog. We’re both dog people, but even when we were on vacation he was a bit much for the two of us. Adorable and wonderful to have sleeping on our feet, but early-rising, mud-footed, and frquently eating inappropriate things. I can’t imagine adding our work schedules to that as well… Better for a different stage of life than the current one.)

A white Christmas

Against all odds, it snowed on Christmas Day!! I couldn’t believe it when the rain kept getting more full-bodied and white. Such a pretty, cozy, unexpected treat. I didn’t manage to take any photos during the daylight, but here’s the snow lit by the tree in our backyard that Kristina decorated. We may have to leave these lights up year-round. 🙂

(Though we won’t keep that enormous pile of brush.)

Finally in the spirit

Despite our intentions of having a tree set up and ready to decorate when Kevin’s family arrived, we spent those last few days madly drywalling, and then the last 24 hours madly cleaning up a month’s worth of construction tools, dust and debris. In the end, it wasn’t until they arrived that we piled in the car to go find one. It turned out to be a great group activity. We headed over to our old neighbourhood, and though the lot that I bought from last year had already been taken down, we spotted another tree lot behind one of the drive-up espresso huts. We all seemed to love the same tree, but the price was atrocious, and so reluctantly we left. The lot guy followed us back to the car and offered a $20 discount, which made it merely expensive, and so we took it.

It’s definitely the prettiest of the Boston and Seattle trees I’ve had over the last five years. Lots of strong branches, and it’s full while still having plenty of holes for ornaments to hang in. The needles have a pretty blue tint to them. And it smells wonderful.

After bringing it home and chopping off the base, Kevin and his dad got it in the stand:

We listened to the Josh Groban Christmas cd that Kevin’s mom gifted us with, I put up the lights, we all did ornaments, and then Kevin and Kristina finished up the tinsel. So pretty.

We also did several spots with spare pine branches, pine cones and candles. On the family room windows:

(and a dramatic zoom-in)

… the living room,

… and the kitchen.

The fish room fireplace got a wreath. (We’ve actually had it since the beginning of December, during one of the Home Depot runs. It’s a little squashy by this point, since it keeps launching itself off of the wall and onto the floor.)

To get in the spirit, we had strawberry-basil martinis – more of a summer-by-the-grill drink, but the colors are seasonally appropriate at least, and it’s been the house drink of 2007 so we felt obligated to serve it to our company. 🙂

As everyone finished up the tree, I finally wove my advent wreath. (Here, concentrating and intent.)

Instead of four weeks of advent, it only got four days. But it was bright and new (instead of dry and crispy) for the visit, and it meant that we could actually leave the candles burning for all of dinner each night, which was pretty.