Category: mountains

Larry’s apartment

Larry invited us over on Saturday for pizza and a sunset. Pretty amazing. When we got there, you could still barely see the mountains, but the sun got lower and the view just got prettier and prettier. He’s about half a mile south of our old apartment, and way up on the hill, so he has an incredible almost-180 degree view from the bird sanctuary in Bellevue all the way up to Juanita. By sunset, it was all dark purple Olympics against an orange sky.

And then it just got mellower and softer, and the mountains kept getting clearer. We watched all of the lights come out in Seattle on the hills on the far side of the lake.

I’ve missed that view.

Happy Halloween!

I bought pumpkins for the new house!

So festive. 🙂 This picture is actually a little bit amusing, as it was taken after realizing that we had to move the pumpkins left about a foot and a half. The garage door kicks out when it opens, and so the first time we went to hit the switch post-pumpkin-purchase, it neatly booted the backs of the things and sent them rolling down the driveway. Oops!! (I’m sure we could make some sort of great suburban sport out of that if we tried… driveway pumpkin bowling, anyone?) They’ve been relocated out of the line of fire and don’t seem any the worse for wear.

We’re almost, almost done moving the apartment – just some last fish tank things and cleaning supplies remain. I had to document the nth trip, since my car has earned countless points for usefulness in the last few weeks. It’s 3.1 miles from apartment to house, and I think I’ve done just under 20 loads in that time. Not too bad, especially since that meant we could just reuse all of the packing supplies that we kept from the wedding and unpack in between trips.

The best part of all these trips has to be the sunsets – the mountains have been out a surprising number of the days. I took a slight detour to see the prettiness from the 405 pedestrian overpass.

Too lovely.

A soothing mountain shot

Nothing exciting on the house front (just lots of trips to move books and canned goods — heavy! — plus some spackling, which doesn’t make for showy photos), and so here are the mountains from the top of the street.

I’ve been trying so hard to not think about how much I’ll miss the apartment — I’m so bad at transitions, and while I love the new house it’s not home yet. (It’s probably bad timing with the move and the Series, but now I’m also having dreams about leaving the Boston apartment. Sad.) The new house is still mostly checklists and echoing spaces. Furniture and rugs will help a lot (and I can see myself doing all my favourite things in the right places: eating, cooking, curling up to read, quilting and NPR, TV and knitting…) and I’m looking forward to the first night that we actually sleep there (Saturday), but it’s still alien and the (increasingly empty) apartment is the comforting place to retreat to at the end of the evening to eat dinner and watch the Red Sox.

We’ve made a lot of progress on the appliances and services front. After many phone calls, Sears WILL give us our refrigerator (yay!!) on the 31st — a week later than hoped, but we can ferry the frozen fish food back from the apartment for the last 3 days of October, and things will be cold soon enough that we can transfer food instead of tossing it or trying to take over unsuspecting eastside friends’ refrigerators… Lowes is dropping our new washer and dryer off the same day. Verizon installs our DSL on Wednesday, too, and I have appointments for the plumber and installation people to give estimates, the furnace people to come do furnace maintenance, and the chimney people to come clean the two chimneys. (Sounds like I’ll be taking a vacation day…)

And thanks for all of the encouraging moving emails and comments — they’ve helped so much. 🙂 It’s nice to have such a group of people well-wishing us along. 🙂

Week Seven

Oops, not the best fantasy week. It didn’t look promising from the outset, since it’s LT’s bye week, and I have a bench full of hurt players (Deion Branch, Alex Smith, Michael Pittman). I picked up a new tight end and threw in Marty Booker to play a full lineup, but lost 64-72. Bummer. The opposing team tried their worst – they regularly break 100 – and the opposing quarterback even threw in a -8 point performance, but it just wasn’t enough. If I’d swapped kickers and played Brown instead of Booker, I could have tied, and then won (ties go to the team with the most QB points, as I learned the hard way in Week 3), but that’s totally hindsight.

QB
QB Drew Brees, NO 14
RUNNING BACKS
RB Marion Barber, Dal 15
WR Marty Booker, Mia 2
RECEIVERS
WR Donte’ Stallworth, NE 11
WR Muhsin Muhammad, Chi 13
TE Quinn Sypniewski 1
DEFENSE
D/ST Patriots 6
KICKER
K Matt Stover, Bal 2
BENCH
QB Damon Huard, KC 3
QB Jason Campbell, Was 0
RB LaDainian Tomlinson, SD (BYE) 0
RB Michael Pittman, TB 0
WR Deion Branch, Sea 0
WR Reggie Brown, Phi 5
TE Alex Smith, TB 0
K Stephen Gostkowski, NE 7

For visual interest, here are pictures of the mountains as I left for work this morning!

Those pretty, clear blue skies are NOT the October norm. I’m more happy than usual to get views of the Olympics in the morning (which is saying something) now that we’re down to those last few days.

And, leaving work at 5:30, Rainier was glowing out over the foothills.

(I had a photo without the garage foreground, but I actually like this one better. That mountain is amazing because it totally overwhelms the rest of the landscape – it just draws the eye.)

Sunset

We had the most dramatic sunset tonight, all dark and purple with gold.

It was drizzling (it has been all day, with a brief interlude of pounding rain – we were both so happy to get to listen to it), but to the north and south were cloud breaks that let in such a bright, gold light.

The street was so shiny that I couldn’t get the camera to focus, but I loved all of the colors in this photo so much that I had to post it in spite of my better judgment.

Sunset!

Now that it’s getting darker earlier (booo), we’ve actually found ourselves heading across the water at sunset. Here are some pictures on the way to a Brown dinner…
On the 520 bridge, three great shots. First, the Olympic mountains…

Then, Rainier out the back window of the mustang:

Then the UW stadium, the Olympics, and Lake Washington:

And finally, from I-5, the sunset and the space needle (love all of those cranes in the foreground!):

More skygazing

I didn’t make quite as much progress on the quilt as I was hoping (10 strips out of 21), but it was still an neat evening, thanks to the eclipse. Kevin got out his tripod and new fancy lens, and got some amazing photos. (He was up anyway, working on his final project for the game development certificate he’s been working on at UW for the past year.)

Here’s the sequence between 1:42 am and 3:00 am:

Neat, huh? Click on the images for the big versions — I was so impressed at the detail that he managed.

And here are the bits of sky transition squares, in the morning sunlight:

I’m feeling very hopeful that these are going to end up working out. My vision is still a bit hazy, and this example photo isn’t perfect, but I want that late-afternoon golden look that just makes the lake shine out and the mountains pop:

Capping off a weird week for weather

Friday morning, just as I was getting ready to leave for work, I heard what sounded suspiciously like thunder. Sure enough, the sky was charcoal, and the thunder just got louder, as the rain started pouring down. Seattle, despite its rainy reputation, gets almost no thunder, and on the rare occasions that I’ve heard it, it’s generally a solitary crack, and then nothing for another six months.

Friday morning, just as I was getting ready to leave for work, I heard what sounded suspiciously like thunder. Sure enough, the sky was charcoal, and the thunder just got louder, as the rain started pouring down. Seattle, despite its rainy reputation, get almost no thunder, and on the rare occasions that I’ve heard it, it’s generally a solitary crack, and then nothing for another six months.

This was a real storm, though, and lasted almost twenty minutes. I had to try to get a picture of the rain bouncing off the street.

Not exactly the typical view from the front porch!!

The weather seemed to spend itself, and the afternoon looked clear and sunny, from the glimpses I stole out of the neighbour-across-the-hall’s office window.

We’ve had a week of particularly amazing sunsets. Here was last night’s at 9:02 (the days are still long!):

There were at least two dozen sailboats in view out on the water, which made the evening particularly pretty.

A sunset photo

Gorgeous loveliness at the end of the street, courtesy of Kevin and his digital camera…

Oooh! I love all of the clouds on the horizon, pretending to be mountains. It kept looking like the Olympics were poking through, and then you’d look again only to realize the clouds had shifted into new positions.

Astronomers for a day

On Thursday, we had yet another snow day following the evening ice and snow. The upside (aside from the obvious prettiness outside and cozyness in) was that we were home at sunset, and able to climb up the hill to try to get a look at Comet McNaught. There’d been a blurb in the paper calling this the brightest comet since Hale-Bopp, and which instructed you to look more or less “at” the sun right after sunset. For the first twenty minutes or so, we didn’t see anything. It was a gorgeous, cold evening though, and Kevin and I spent a good while at the top of the hill admiring the scenery. Kevin got some great Olympic mountain photos – click for a bigger, prettier version where you can see the snow on the peaks.

See it? Here’s a zoom-in:

Friday and Saturday were both cloudy, so it was fun to have the chance to see it while it was still around!