Category: Seattle

More snow!

It snowed last night, starting around three, and just kept going. Waking up was fun – lots of snow on the ground, and that gold light coming through all of the lacy tree branches was beautiful.

The walk to work this morning was too pretty: white and crunchy. The snow had clearly refrozen a few times, but it gave good traction for walking. All of the branches were feathered, and as the sun hit them they started to melt, so lots of little showers along the sidewalk.

The street ours connects to was still pretty snow and ice covered, but the main street was clear. My peace kept being disrupted by horrible clanking. Several cars were driving along the bare pavement with chains on. This photo is terrible (into the light and I was trying to be quick and sneaky), but this guy on the left actually had them on all four tires.

Given the amount of snow still on his roof, I’m guessing he’d only been driving for a few minutes, and he had a Microsoft tag on his car, so he got up and put the chains on for his 3 mile drive to work. Typical Seattle.

Coming home tonight, the snow on our street (and yard, and roof) was mostly still there. So lovely.

Sorry that it’s been so long

Oh, man, I’m far behind. I got lulled by my lack of bloggable photos and didn’t post, and now all sorts of interesting things have happened: the start of (fantasy) football and the related knitting, the back deck gardening success, the baby born (and sweater, etc. revealed, finally), the quilt progress and regression…

Usually I cope with lack of posting by just putting up five posts in a night (RSS feeds be damned), but for some reason this all feels intermingled, so this will be the longest post ever. Sorry?

So first of all, I went to the Farmers’ market a week ago Saturday. My intention was to pick up flowers, peaches and veggies (all of which were accomplished with the typical farmers’ market glee), but there were a few fun additions. I ran into Pam from my knitting group at the skirt stall, fun. And then after I was done shopping, I returned to the booth and bought one! (My Christmas stocking had a bit of fun money in it, and though we’re a full ¾ of the year later, I found something great to use it on. 🙂 Nice! )

Here are the farmers market flowers with the front of Isabella. I’ve finally made it to the lace – the knitting is so, so much more interesting now. I’ve made quite a few more rows since this photo and they’ve just flown by. All of the football in the last week hasn’t hurt the progress!

The plants on the back deck have been entertaining. The tomatoes are going strong. I’ve picked five so far, and there are at least 10 more in various stages of ripening waiting in the wings. The beans keep appearing – every time I give up and expect the end, I see 7 more waiting to be picked. No complaints! Best snack ever.

The strawberries just started blooming again a few weeks ago, and the fruits are closer and closer to being ripe to pick. And, exciting to me, the poor pepper plant that got overrun by the beans, is actually making peppers regardless. How cool!! Definitely runty and late, but I’m just delighted by every sign of progress.

And finally, I’ve been working on the pine trees for the quilt. They’ve been weighing on me ( a classic case of unexecutable vision), and I finally charted and started to construct them last weekend. Here’s the result about a third of the way in…

Since then I’ve been finishing and ripping back squares without quite finishing anything. I LOVE the deep-dark pine tree colors up close, but against the lake and land business, they don’t really work. I’m struggling to come up with a reasonable solution… so far I’ve tried improving the tree/water contrast (helps, but not enough). Next up is mixing in more medium greens to go with the darks. I may have to switch to mountains and hills and then return to this – I love the squares but they just don’t fit the quilt.
I meant to write about the baby knitting as part of my catch-all post, but then realized that it would be easier to have my pattern notes separate. So, to be carried on in a later post… 🙂

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!):

Labour Day update

So first of all, we’re having the neatest thunderstorm. Kevin watched the lightning as it came in from the north, and about 20 minutes later we had *actual thunder* that’s continued to rumble, as the rain continued to pour, for about the last hour.

I am a happy camper. There’s nothing like real weather.

It’s been a bit of an odd weekend. All of a sudden, twilight is happening at 7:20pm, instead of 9+ pm, and that’s thrown everyone for a loop. I can’t figure out how it keeps getting dark so early – I feel like the sunset has dipped 90 minutes in about a week and a half, which doesn’t seem rational. And the air has been cold, especially overnight, and smells like fall, which is sort of daunting. Add that to the house–closing date of October 12th, and you just want to unpack the sweaters and eat cheese, pasta, and wine and skip to fall colors. I’m not ready for full-out fall, especially the grey, but it’s better that this slow unwinding.

I made a ton of progress on the quilt. Not only are all of the transition squares done, but I sewed the sky together. Here are crummy photos with the flash of the front (with toes for scale — like the flipflop tan??):

And back:

Next up is those last four squares of lake/majestic-pines. I have them charted out, it’s just a matter of mustering the concentration – they’re complicated.
And then the hills (U-district, queen anne), and the last bits of the Olympic Mountains, and then the comforter and I will be in business. 🙂

PS. We’re having constant spider problems. They’re everywhere. (Typical, unfortunately, for late summer and fall.)

This guy, though, takes the cake. He’s enormous, and built a 2′ wide web, on an angle, over our porch light (which granted, does get a lot of bugs. I was creeped out. Kevin took photos.

Ugh.

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?

A muddle of Thursday things

We (and the Brown dinner crowd) just got back from the Harry Potter movie. The IMAX at the pacific science center hosted a “wells and spells” viewing — a ticket got you into the science museum and movie, plus a(n adult) drink, they had snacks, and lots of attention to theme. I was very impressed at how many people showed up in hogwarts attire, including an extremely convincing snape. It made me wish I had a Weasley sweater, or at least a house scarf, at the ready. 🙂 And I call myself a knitter…

The movie itself annoyed me, but then again I never like movies based on books. Since I’d just reread 5 last weekend, I was particularly galled. That said, Luna was great, and the I’m fascinated (in a sort of horrified way due to Umbridge’s outfits) how long it takes until the knit patterns based on the movie start appearing. I feel like they were catering to the knitters, in a way — so many different sweaters, scarves, vests, dresses, and ponchos. It was also fun to get to wear the 3D glasses for a portion — I think it added a lot.

And then we got home, and I was confronted, again, with a major disappointment of today:

Apparently Kevin’s fancy camera was on some secret setting that makes everything glow in space — the room was pretty dim, and I don’t know why it didn’t turn out. So, do you see the problem?

Here, try again with a (this time very dark and deep) picture taken by my camera:

The six new squares are bigger than the others. These are the first squares I’ve done in color pattern for the quilt (except for the purple/mountains, and I stopped a year ago on those because something had gone all wrong and I blocked out exactly what). I was trying to follow my pattern last night, and the things were way too big — I was already up to the 5″ strip, which is the largest, on the 16th block of the square, but each square should have 21 blocks. So I held the squares up to the ones I’ve already done, and they were exactly the same size, but missing five pieces. It took me ages, I kept recounting and remeasuring, but eventually I realized that all 55 squares I’ve done so far (including the 32 that I’ve already sewed together into a large block of sky) are all too small by four blocks (an inch of height and width). I’ve been ending up with 5×5 inch blocks, and I needed 6×6 blocks.

Once I made the first few, I just kept following the pattern.

This is demoralizing. I’ve been really excited by my piecing progress recently, and now I have tons more fabric to cut, strips to sew, blocks to iron, and before I can do most of it, I have to remove many, many yards of teensy machine-sewed seems. A major bummer. We’re thinking of moving (a house?), and I need to have this done before we leave because it’s a representation of where we live now (and the first place we’ve lived together). It’s so important to me to “seal” its importance by seeing it here before we go. I’m already regrouping, but when I first realized the mistake, it was a blow.

On a much brighter and happier note, here are the flowers that Kevin brought home for my birthday!

I had a long and self-pitying post about how much I liked being 25 and why I wasn’t ready to move on, but I scrapped it in favour of pretty closeup flower shots. 🙂 Here’s the red:

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 scorcher

My mom runs Vista on her laptop, and has it set up so that she can see the weather for Seattle, New York and DC (where me and my siblings live) in the sidebar on the desktop. According to her, I’ve been winning for the last week or so. Sunny and low 80s easily beats humid and upper 90s. Yesterday, though, started to get really hot (89 on my car thermometer at one point!), and today, we’re supposed to hit 98. Anything over 85 is severely alarming to the general Seattle population — we aren’t equipped for hot weather.

Kevin and I would merrily go to our air conditioned offices and then complain heartily when we finally got home to a baking apartment, and leave it at that, but the fish (as usual) complicate things. We generally have a few days a summer where we worry about the tank getting too hot. It’s stressful for the fish, and there’s real concern that our corals could bleach. You can buy a chiller to keep the water cool, but they’re expensive, and not really worth it for our climate. Usually we keep the tank reasonable cool (under 81 degrees) by closing the blinds in the apartment. If it looks like it will break into the mid eighties, we turn a fan on the lights, to chase away their hot air, and to promote evaporation, which cools the water.

Today, the tank was already over 82 at 8:00 am. Eek.

(And look at that salt creep!! When it’s hot, we have to wipe down the salt every few days instead of every few weeks.)
So, fan, upstairs windows open, shades drawn, and Kevin’s braving the heat to work at home so that he can do water changes with cool water every hour or so. We’re cooling the next bucket with a ziplock of regular ice (since it has chlorine in it, we can’t put the ice in the water directly).

Then, in a flash of inspiration, I remembered that I still had my ice cube trays from Boston (pre-ice maker). We poured some of our fresh top-off water into those, and those ones will be able to go directly into the refugium. Nice.

Keep cool, little fish!

9:37 pm, June 22, and assorted reverie

I didn’t think to take a photo on the solstice, but I do want to commemorate the loooonnng Seattle afternoons of June. It doesn’t start to hit twilight until a bit after 8:30, the sun sets a while after nine, and at 9:37 on one of the two second-longest days of the year, the light looks like this:

Seattle at this time of year is a gift. The weather is inconsistently and unpredictably gorgeous (one day, all of the mountains are out and it’s 78, and then it’ll reverse course and we’ll have a few days of looming grey and mid-sixties). The surprise of the weather is happy to me — most seasons out here are so monochromatic. The plants thrive and it’s fun to see the blackberries and random wildflowers blooming on the highway. The light lasts forever. Kevin and I have taken to sleeping in masks (thank you, JetBlue) so that we can leave the blinds and windows open but don’t have to wake up at five with the sun. Nights are still cool, which makes comforters and open windows wonderful. (We’ve had the heat off for about two months.) Everyone’s grilling, as you walk around the neighbourhood in the evening, and it’s a pleasure to spend forty minutes tinkering and watering out on the deck when you get home from work.

And while I know that there’s a reality check in November through March, this time of year is just so full of promise, and things to do, and happiness.

Not to mention Microsoft intern memories. Kevin and I met more or less today, five years ago, camping in the Olympic National park with, as I described it on my first blog (now just a memory), “15 kids, 5 cars, 4 tents, and way too much gear”.

I actually brought my boyfriend of the moment, and the fact that Kevin and I were next to each other in that photo was coincidence. We didn’t know each other a bit — some of my intern friends were friends with some of his intern friends. After the trip, the whole gang of us started hanging out, for movie nights, dinners, and a zillion activities around Washington. We all had cameras, and there were a million photos of that summer. Only looking back later did I realize that seeing this photo of Kevin was part of the reason we started dating.

Why did it matter? Who knows? It just did. Blond, cool, and way too smart for his own good. And then he drove me to AND from the airport for my parents’ anniversary, and then he wooed me, and now we are where we are today. 🙂

To close, here’s a five-years-old tomorrow photo of the view on the way up the mountain to Hurricane Ridge. I haven’t been back to the Olympics since that summer. Here’s hoping this is the year.