Author: Susan

Handmade, for us.

Lynn, of Scott and Lynn (the same long-time family friends who invited us to the Red Sox game!), made us a wedding quilt. It’s truly gorgeous.

Here it is on the futon: the colors couldn’t be prettier or richer, and it just glows there. I can’t wait until it gets greyer (not something I say often), because if it looks this cheering in August, it will be cozy and amazing in December.

Here’s the back:

I love that stripe of color.

And the front:

And a medley so that you can see some of the fabrics close up, not to mention the quilting!

Isn’t she talented? I can’t even imagine how much work this was — it’s gorgeous.

Red Sox in Seattle!!

We were invited to go see the Red Sox vs. Mariners game on Sunday, by friends of my parents that live in the area. The game was amazing, and the seats could not have been better. We were front row, right behind the Red Sox bullpen. On the whole, I’m not a particularly star-struck person, but it was a thrill to keep seeing all those faces from 8 feet away.

The game was neat. In addition to gorgeous sunshine and all of the Blue Angels flying around for Seafair, the Red Sox were just ON. 9-2!, Manny had a home run, Ortiz stole second base, there were several amazing layout catches, and the Mariners moose ran over Coco Crisp with an ATV.

varitek was having trouble hitting, but he just kept battling all game. He’s so serious and professional. His last at-bat was a long series of fly balls. He didn’t end up getting on base, but you had to admire his perseverce.

Kevin got a great shot of Ortiz clocking it.

He was probably the most fun to see in person and close up. When he was warming up before going up to bat, it was just incredible to see how powerful a person he is. You just don’t get that from TV. (Plus there was a pretty major contingent of little kids all obsessed with “Big Papi”. Good to see that these west coasters are raising their children right. :-P)

Here are Ortiz and Crisp congratulating Manny on his homer:

.. and mirabelli yelling at the moose after he clipped Coco Crisp. The bench was really upset.

And it was fun to see Beckett pitch such a great game. Here he is coming off in the 8th.

Baseball games don’t get much better than that.

Blue Angels

It’s Seafair weekend here in Seattle, and we decided to kayak out to the edge of Hunt’s Point to see the Blue Angels. The show started at 1:30, but we didn’t have waffles until 11:30 and I was still at the farmers’ market at 12:30, and so we were a bit late. The planes flew directly overhead as we were getting ready to launch our boats. Very cool (though I think they look kind of creepy), but we’d meant to be a 30 minute paddle down the lake by that point. Oops. 🙂 Clearly there’s a slight difference between military punctuality and what you can expect from the two of us on a Saturday. 🙂

I brought my camera along in a ziplock bag in my life jacket’s pouch. Here are all six planes flying right in front of us!

It seemed like the accompanying BOOM should have made a wave of its own, but the water stayed calm. And then here they are swooping over the U district for another high speed pass over Mercer Island.

The paddle back was a bit more exciting than our meander over as we had to contend with the wake of all of the boats returning from the show. I desperately wanted a photo, both of the mammoth wake (some of it compared to the mail boats on Winnepesauke), and the myriad boats, but I didn’t trust myself not to drop the camera into the lake while I was taking it out of my life jacket pocket (the waves were so constant), so you’ll just have to imagine a zillion boats, ranging from small bow riders to sailboats to yachts, plowing back north to Kirkland from the show.

I am not a spider person

… and pacific northwest spiders are a force to be reckoned with. They’ve been increasingly ever-present for the last month (I feel like I’m dripping in spiderweb shards whenever I leave the house, since they love our front and back decks). Unfortunately, the biggest one I’ve see so far this year has taken up residence in the tomato plant.

Kevin took a picture:

It gives me goosebumps just to look at it. Shudder.

At least the tomatoes are getting huge, too?

Clownfish in the mist

I love this photo.

One of the tank care items that we do every other day or so is to blast the rocks and sand with a turkey baster, to stir up debris and detritus. Then it can be filtered out of the water, and the tank looks all glittery and clear a few hours later. I’ve always felt terrible for the fish, though, since it would be like breathing smoke, until we went to Hawaii and saw how murky with sand the water there gets every afternoon when the wind picks up. Since then, I’ve been basting with renewed vigour.

This picture was of Clack from the back of the tank, through the swirling murk. In the tank, you can see the pink mushrooms, yellow and orange zoos,
and the cursed shiny green bubble algae. You can also see through the tank into the living room: the red couch with its white pillows, the kayaks in their stand… Still life of living room through a fishtank. 🙂

New yarn and fun buttons

I needed cute, fun, wash & dryable white flower buttons for my mystery knitting project, and so I made a point while we were in Boston of taking a trip to Windsor Button. It’s between my old office and the Park Street T station – and so a fun and nostalgic place to visit. I haven’t been there in three years, and it’s gentrified quite a bit. Much more yarn — I had fun browsing. And all the buttons you could wish for, except they’re all behind a counter, which makes color matching hard. That serendipity of an unexpected match can’t happen because you’re squinting from two yards away. Kind of a pity.

In any case, I found my flower buttons.

And, I found good gender-neutral Cotton Fleece for a friend’s fall baby, and adorable elephant buttons.

The buttons don’t quite match, but it’s a near enough miss that I’ll probably use them anyway. 🙂

Back to Boston

We went to Boston for the weekend (we’re such jetsetters. :-P). One of Kevin’s favourite fraternity brothers was getting married to his college girlfriend. Such a fun reason to go back. We redeyed in Friday morning, (miraculously) were able to check into the hotel eight hours early, napped for a while, and then hit the town.

We were staying right by the Common, so we headed over to walk along Newbury. I found a clutch for the wedding, and we met up at Trinity Booksellers (where my Boston knitting group used to meet). I drank tea and read the Globe while Kevin looked for a book, and then we headed to Croma for specialty pizzas and cocktail hour.

I put down the knitting for this picture. Kevin loves it — apparently I have a happy smile when I’m back in Boston.

And then a round of drinks later, here’s Kevin and Newbury street.


The weather was gorgeous, and the people watching was great. And later that night, after a nap, we met up with slews of Kevin’s college friends. Such fun. Especially where I barely got to talk to any of them at our wedding, I loved having the chance to catch up so soon after.

On Saturday, we split up to do our own things. I had errands (centered around the yarn store!), and Kevin wanted to play with his new camera lens. We’d barely left the hotel, though, when the sky just opened, and unleashed one of the longest and most dramatic thunderstorms I’ve ever seen. It went right over Downtown Crossing, and the rivers of water running down the brick streets, with pelting rain splashing everywhere, and simultaneous thunder and lightning, were truly spectacular.

We both flew back to the hotel to change, and then walked the two blocks (the rain let up just before, thankfully) to the Four Seasons for the wedding. It was gorgeous (my pictures are here — sorry that they’re so dark). It was so meaningful and interesting to attend another wedding barely two months after our own, and so fun to see Jim and Jess together.

I only have one picture of the two of us. I think Kevin should come up with more reasons to wear a tux. 🙂

And here are the bride and groom dancing together. 🙂

A garden post, now that it’s stopped raining

I wish that I had more quilt squares to show you, but that has very temporarily been placed on the back burner. We’re heading to Boston this weekend for a wedding (I didn’t have a dress), and I just found out that I need to have gifts all knitted for a shower by the end of July (I hadn’t started), so I’ve been being responsible and not working on the quilt, even though I wanted to.

Instead, here are garden pictures! I think the beans are just about done. I had another nice big handful last night, but I don’t see any more flowers or teeny ones. I think they couldn’t cope with the week of rain and clouds — whatever momentum they had seems to have died. A great experiment though, and one I certainly intend to repeat! The new excitement is the tomatoes, which are coming on strong. There are LOTS of them, and they’re getting quite big. Still green, but I’m so pleased with them. The basil is also getting huge — time for more strawberry-basil martinis?

And because I thought it was cool, here’s a ladybug in the mint!

There’s a ladybug-ish thing on the next stalk. I have no idea what it is. If I had to come up with a theory, I would say that it looked like the ladybug took a page from our shrimp’s book and molted, but I didn’t think beetles did that. Huh?

And there’s the lake

My nice healthy state of denial about losing the house is occasionally chipping, and there’s no Harry Potter to distract me like yesterday, and so it’s been an out of sorts kind of day.

A major bright side is that I finally went through and tallied all of the quilt squares I need to make larger, and the damage isn’t as bad as I thought. I’ve already fixed the 7 green squares. On Friday, I cut the strips for the fifteen lake squares, and today I finished sewing them. I have four more mixed green/blue squares, and then the bottom portion of the quilt will be ready to sew together!

So next up on the fixing bandwagon are the pale blue and yellow sky squares. These will be a project, since they’re already all seamed together. There are 28 squares — five short of what’ I’ve completed so far. Those 28 squares need to be seam-ripped apart, I need to cut 4 new strips for each, and then sew the strips on and re-seam. I keep going back and forth on how daunting I find that work. It’s probably about 5 nights worth?

The good news is that the mountains are already big! Those are the ones I was dreading, since I was already running out of two of the purples, and there’s no way I could have finished if I also had to make existing squares larger. I remember vague angst about needing to rethink some part of the design as the reason I’d stopped sewing last summer, but I’d blocked out exactly what had happened to make me feel like this project was hopeless. I’m guessing that the size of the already-completed squares took the prize.

I’ve updated the sidebar to show the resizing status. (The dark blue and green squares are already counted as finished, given this weekend’s work.) Jobs like this are easier when you can appreciate your progress.

Not a spoiler

It came!

The UPS guy knocked on the door around 10:30 with the Harry Potter book from Amazon. I love the packaging.

I know it’s a huge money maker for Amazon, and obviously they’d go out of their way, but the Saturday morning delivery was a brilliant idea.

The book itself was interesting. I really don’t think it’s a kids book. And I can see why Rowling thought it was the book to write, but I wish she’d chosen a different path. I can’t wait until everyone’s done reading and the conversation starts — there’s certainly enough to talk about.