Author: Susan

So I took all of your excellent advice and planted the garlic. Wow.

It does grow, doesn’t it?! In a week and two days, the three bulbs, only two of which had small shoots before being planted, have produced three many-inch shoots, plus a few rogue ones off to the side. I’m not used to plants in my care exhibiting this sort of enthusiam for life!

They’re sharing a pot with the unfortunate strawberry plant — after its awesome berry episode, it managed to get covered with teeny web-spinning bugs. I put it outside and the frost killed the bugs (score!) but also the leaves (oops.). The root structure is still deep and strong and the stalks are bendy and green, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it be inspired by the cohabiting garlic and will grow back.

It’s been a year since we put our lights on the tank and so is time, to our wallets’ chagrin, to put in new bulbs. Our hood is a JBJ Formosa DX, which is 4x65W, and we started with 2 bulbs of 7100K (the blue lights) and 2 10000K bulbs (the white). We’d bought this with the recommendation of switching in true actinics for the 7100K after a year, but when we got home with the actinics, the light was no longer blue but purple. All of the corals, especially the green and yellow, were completely washed out. So, we went back to the fish store and traded them in for a pair of SunPaq bulbs that are half actinic and half 7100K. The blue light is back! You can tell, though, that the daylight bulbs have lost most of their power because the blue light overwhelms the white. We’ll wait a week or two so as not to shock all the tank inhabitants, then swap out those bulbs for new.

While we were playing with the bulbs, I also moved our green zoo frag rock over to encourage it to spread onto one of our main rocks. I’d encouraged a few zoos off of the original colony onto this one about two months ago, then cut it loose and in the last few weeks they’ve nearly doubled in size and number.

I want them to spread onto our big rock (aka the gramma’s rock, since he sleeps in a cave inside it). It’s more or less 15″ long, 10″ deep, and 14″ tall, and already has our original zoo colony on the upper left face and some transplanted orange zoos on the back.

I’m hoping that our gorgeous green zoos can be persuaded to cover the lower left edge.

Our green mushroom has finally budded a new baby green mushroom! We’re delighted. The proud (?) parent is all folded up below its new offspring here:

(Thank you, tulip mode… still loving that. :-))

I’ve been feeling very loved this week.

First presents arrived from my parents on Tuesday (thus dashing all previously-held thoughts than my procrastinating tendencies may come from them…). Such pretty sparkly paper! I was particularily flattered by the green tree paper. My mother, like her mother before her, is a great re-user of pretty paper. I recognize this one from a while back, so I’m flattered that we seemed like the right people to send it to next. It looks so pretty on the table (Since there’s no tree to put presents under, I’ve been putting them by the Christmas wreath, where they look quite festive).

Then, we got a present from Japan! Kevin’s friend Jim got transfered to Tokyo about a year ago, and he and his girlfriend Jess sent us what we quickly concluded was a beautiful sake set, along with a bottle to break it in with. There was also a lovely card of little santa-like elves under a bridge and cherry trees — they reminded me of the elves in Babar.

The label didn’t have a character that we recognized other than the 60% which we both thought was neat:

I’m amazed, as always, by their ability to cast themselves into a completely foreign culture. Merry Christmas, Jim and Jess!

Then, in a return to culture that we’re more familiar with, my grandparents sent us a beautiful handpainted ornament of Fenway. I’m not such a “sports on the tree” person, but this is just so pretty, and such a fun reminder of home, that it is a category unto itself. I love it. It, and the adorable puppy on the note that came with it, are sitting next to the advent wreath now as well.

It’s so fun to have all these reminders of people that we love at hand. 🙂

I just thought I’d post a picture of the sky, for interest’s sake. Last year was dark and cloudy all through November, but when we hit December 1st, the sun came out and stayed through mid-April. I was thinking it was just an odd year, but the first two weeks of December have done it again:

It’s been quite cold (I have to scrape thick frost off the car in the morning, except when Kevin’s sweet and does it for me), and the days are very short, but I love having the sun and the mountains back. Seeing the crystal clear Olympics and Cascades on the way to work is such a lift. 🙂 The mountains have so much more texture when they’re snow-covered. I would have taken a photo, but snapping while driving seems a recipe for disaster, no?

Over the course of the year, our substrate snail population had become a bit depleted. I think we lost a bunch of them when we removed 2/3 of the gravel in June, but in any case, with our pretty sand bed, it was time to head to the store and pick up a new crew.

I forgot how much of a kick I get out of them. I’m not sure if they’re nocturnal or just very sleepy, but for most of the day they bury themselves under the sand. They have an amazing sense of smell, and when it’s time for the fish to eat, they pop out of the sand with very little warning and, trunks forward, cruise over to the source of the food.

Frequently, they also engage in the folly of glass-climbing. They really aren’t cut out for it, so you see them go up, up, then their speed starts to fade, their snorkle starts to waver, and they go careening down the glass again. You can practically hear them shrieking mayday.

I don’t know why they’re so fun to watch since the behaviour is always the same, but seriously: endless amusement. It’s great to have them back.

Somehow I’ve managed to find another project for myself.

We’ve been in our apartment for nearly a year and half. The layout is a kitchen, living room, spare bedroom and spare bath downstairs, and our bed and bath plus a large “bonus room” upstairs. When we were looking (we flew out for a whirlwind weekend to find an apartment a month before we drove out to Seattle for good), we wanted a two bedroom apartment, on the theory that our computers needed their own room, and that we might want more space from each other than a 1 bdrm would provide. This was our favourite apartment by far, and it came with the bonus room (This seems to be a Seattle thing — I’ve never seen them before. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it’s an open room that doesn’t have a door of its own, usually open to the stairwell and on the second floor.) So we ended up with more space than we needed. And no real furniture to fill it, but we used the downstairs bedrooms as a sort of project-and-fishtank-extras holder and had both of our desks upstairs. A few weeks ago, Kevin cleverly figured out that the bedroom downstairs has a door and so would be a great place to move his xbox and music so that we could both listen to our own things, so we moved his desk and zillions of computer parts downstairs, and moved the futon upstairs, so that now the bonus room just has my computer and bookshelves and a nice big reading area. Win-win. 🙂 In this spirit of beautification, I started looking for footstools to go with our butterfly chairs (also in the bonus room). We have one Ikea chair with a footstool that I bought off one of his friends after college, and since we moved we’ve been carrying that footrest up and down stairs depending where we want to sit that day. It’s not heavy, but it is cumbersome and it seemed a bit dumb. However, after looking online for an afternoon, I remembered why we didn’t have a pair of footstools for the butterfly chairs already — they’re wildly expensive. Cheap looking ones start at $50 each and they go straight up from there.

Luckily, I am not afraid of a project (or unluckily, depending on how much you enjoy uncluttered carpet), and so I found two old barstools in the classifieds for $15 to convert into footrests. The guy was very conscientious about making sure that we realized that they were a bit rough-looking. I in turn didn’t tell him that I intended to saw them apart.

The saw has been getting a lot of use recently. I finished this up on Sunday night before Grey’s Anatomy…

… and then added a coat of paint:

The color didn’t come out at all — the picture looks sky blue, but really it’s periwinkle to match a throw that I bought a few months ago for the futon. I tried taking more shots at different times of day but didn’t have better luck.

Now, the final step is to make a round cushion for the top of each, and matching square pillows for the futon to tie all of the parts together. I have the fabric cut and ironed, and am waiting for a bit of sewing inspiration to strike. 🙂

We’re going to visit Kevin’s family in Pennsylvania for Christmas this year, so in spite of my regret every time I see beautiful trees like this, we aren’t going to put one up this year. 🙁 It didn’t make sense to have one up only to take it down two weeks later, or to leave it up unwatered while we were gone. Instead, we decided to get a pretty wreath of some sort. I found a lovely (and cheap!) one with all different kinds of evergreen at Lowe’s, and brought it home for our wall:

Then, while I was there, I asked for the sawed-off bottom of someone’s tree, which they gave me for free! After some heavy sawing on the front porch (though nothing like last year’s tree destruction), I went from this:

to this:

and this:

over the mantle and halfway up the stairs. And with enough left over for an advent wreath. 🙂 It was great to get to go through all of the ornaments to find the few I wanted to take out, and so now even if we don’t have a tree I feel very in the spirit.

So much for being done by Thanksgiving. 😛

I’ve been steadily knitting over the last two weeks and am about a third of the way through the second half of the front. I stopped the first front about 5/6 of the way through when the ball ended (just after the photo below was taken). The knitting is relatively exciting, given the amount of yarn that I have left, all of which is in the picture below. Ack!

Now that the ball has run out for the first front, and I can guess how much I’ll need for the second front, it’s seeming really unlikely that the scraps will be sufficient to finish… There’s still a shot that I could make it with an inch or two to spare, but in the meantime it’s definitely suspenseful.

I’ve called around to try to get the same die lot (#084), but no luck. I’m hoping that with the cables, any color difference won’t be too noticeable. Fingers crossed.

We’re definitely in candle season. Something about such short days and the cold, and I’m finally lighting candles again at night. Given that, I was particularly delighted when Carol (the aunt of the earrings) taught me a trick for getting all of the leftover wax out of the bottom of the candle holder: put them in the freezer. Come back in an hour or two and they pop out perfectly. How cool!

Evidence that it works: a before and after with my candle holders from the ski trip with Kevin’s family at Mont Tremblant:

Here’s to shiny-new candleholders and the little things in life. 🙂