Category: Uncategorized

The hydrangea by the driveway is flowering, and we’ve been impressed to see that each bloom is a different color.

The range includes dark blue, light blue, purple, lavender, and pink (sometimes in a gradient across one flower), and while the effect is slightly Technicolor, it’s also exceptionally pretty.

I’ve heard occasionally that the color has to do with the acidity of the soil, but I thought that applied on a bush-by-bush basis, not a branch-by-branch one. If anyone has insights into the mysteries of hydrangea flower color, we’re fascinated.

Saturday was my birthday, and we had to interrupt the all-important waffle preparations to take a few photos of how big I’ve gotten. Saturday was two days shy of full term (37 weeks), and 3 weeks before my due date. My favourite photo of the set was one that Kevin took from my perspective:

Imagine the steady movement of hiccups (he’s still getting them pretty close to hourly), plus some pretty impressive acrobatics, and that’s been my view for the last few weeks.

This is an odd stage of the game – he could come tomorrow (unlikely, but not impossible) or five weeks from now. That’s an enormous span of time to be sitting in limbo. We’ve crossed off nearly all of our must do items before he arrives, including installing the car seat this afternoon. So now we’re down to a steady stream of less urgent house projects, figuring out handoff for projects at work, and generally whiling away the time until he decides to make his appearance.

After six years of weekly service, our waffle maker died in June. We were both so sad to see it go.

(Flowers are from the farmers market, and purchased for general enjoyment, not anything waffle maker specific…) We’ve been remarkably consistent with the weekend waffle tradition, and it’s been hard not having them to look forward to for the last few weeks. (Pancakes, while satisfying, are not as delicious to me, and with all the amazing fresh fruit right now it’s particularly unfortunate timing.) We had a hard time finding a replacement that fit our exacting standards around waffle size and indentation depth, but after two failed attempts through Amazon, we finally have our new dude:

We’re not declaring it an unqualified success yet, since we’re still figuring out what heat setting works best and the little “done” light doesn’t seem particularly attuned to reality. It also spits batter like no one’s business (the old one had this charming habit, too) and it’s a bit hard to clean. Kevin spent the first night removing the beeper, since it drove us both batty during the trial run. But for all that, it makes four waffles at a time (yay! We used to have to cook in batches.) and they are delicious.

A milestone that you don’t read about in the baby books, but an exciting one nonetheless:

Our yogurt’s sell-by date is after my due date! Hooray!

During the effort to empty the closets (getting closer), we made it past another milestone: saying goodbye to dorm room furniture!

I’ve had these $12.99 mismatched shelves since college, and it is a happy thing to no longer have a need for them. They’ve served me well, in myriad ways (including bedside tables and living room side tables), but it’s so nice to bid them farewell.

Careful observers will notice Kevin’s new accessory. He’d hurt his shoulder playing football two weeks ago. He was limping along waiting for it to heal and then decided to go play golf with Larry on Friday – perhaps not the wisest decision. We made a late night ER visit where they were able to tell him that it wasn’t a bone or tendon issue. (Good, we think?) So now he gets to wear the shoulder immobilizer for a week and check in with an orthopedic doctor for followup. It’s been quite the week medically, between my wasps and Kevin’s sports. Hopefully we’re getting it out of our systems?

We did laugh though at my completely premature blog post claiming that all possible obstacles had been removed and we’d paint on Friday night. Practically daring Murphy’s Law to take effect. Luckily, I was only off by one day – we finished taping after yoga on Saturday, we both worked on edging, and then Kevin did the fumey painting with the roller. We need to do a few touchups before we can take the blue tape down, but so far we’re really pleased with the color. I’ll wait to take “after” photos until we get the new carpets in on Wed, but here’s a “before” from the doorway.

We’ve been planning to paint Kevin’s office (soon to be the baby’s room) for the last fortnight, and there keep being delays of one sort or another. First, Kevin decided to remove several useless cable and phone outlets (a great decision) and fix some dents in the wall. With all of the coats of spackles, plus texturing and priming, that took a few days. (It’s been nearly half a year since the last round of drywall repairs in the bathroom, and while I’m sure he wasn’t pining for more drywall projects the walls DO look great now. A vast improvement.)

Then on Monday, I came home from work and started in on the yard – mowing the grass and trimming back bushes. I finished with the front, moved to the back and had just started deadheading the rhododendron when I bumped into a wasp nest. Oops. Seven stings caused enough chaos that neither of us felt like taping.

Then we realized that we not only need to empty the rooms next week (we’re having new carpets installed in all three bedrooms!! Yay! Can’t wait to be rid of that berber!), but we’ll need to empty the closets too because the shelving rests on the floor. So we’ve been gradually emptying our rooms and filling the family room with stacks of books and assorted belongings.

Kevin won the emptying-the-closet game – yay! So now we are truly out of impediments, and painting can begin tomorrow night after work!!

When my sister was here, we were talking about the tree next to our patio and she asked what kind it was. I started to say some sort of fruit but we weren’t quite sure, when I looked up and spied…

… cherries!! Neat! That solves that mystery. Now the remaining question is whether they’d be any good to eat. I am sort of assuming that they’d be edible, but perhaps ornamental tree’s cherries aren’t? Is there a cherry version of the crab apple? Does anyone know offhand?

One more photo, this time of all of the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the branches.

It’s not the prettiest tree on the whole, due to horrendous pruning in its youth, but it does have its occasional merits.

Sorry for two photo-less posts back-to-back (I’m clearly not living up to my new blog name), but Wow. Read this post on boy names from the blog of the baby name wizard. Those are quite the graphs.

If you have a little bit more time (and don’t mind veering off into hypothesis instead of straight reporting of statistics), Kevin and I also thought this post (and the essay it’s based on) on the red state/blue state naming divide were interesting.

I finally have the new blog ported over and ready for posts! (One caveat: I still need to port most of the photos in the archives that were pre-flickr, i.e. before January 2007. I’ll be porting those over gradually over the coming weeks.) Since September 2004, I’ve been posting using blogger, here. I was amazed to realize that I’d written 805 posts there (that’s a post every two and a half days) — a great streak.

Here’s the explanation for the move that I posted there:

I’ve been delaying this decision for months, hoping that blogger would come out with specific new features, but now it’s only weeks until the baby arrives and it’s time to make the change. I started this blog a month after I moved to Seattle (mostly due to inspiration from other knitters), and it’s turned out to be a great way of keeping in touch with family and friends. I’m always surprised and pleased when I see someone in person and they reference pictures or posts, and I love when people leave comments. For a while at the beginning I’d been trying to increase the number of readers and commenters, but I’ve come to appreciate the fact that I know most of my regular readers in real life. There are a handful of people I don’t know who visit regularly, which I think is neat. It’s a public space, and so I’m still wary of the boundaries – I don’t post about work and rarely post about friends, politics, religion, or any of the deep and emotional subjects. But I love my blog as a record of the day-to-day, all of our projects and trips, and seasonal milestones.

That said, our day-to-day is going to be changing, and while I’m fine with posting the occasional baby or family photo (especially to show off hand knits!), it just doesn’t seem like a great idea to broadcast all of the little details to the whole world. That left me with three choices: keep things the way they are and just don’t post about the baby (sad – we want our family and friends across the country to be able to check in), switch to a private blog where you have to log in to see anything (sad because I love getting the occasional dropins from knitters and quilters), or leave blogger for one of the platforms that allows you to have a public blog with occasional private posts. The third option was the clear winner.

So, I’ve been moving the blog over to the new spot (including all 805 posts of the archives and everyone’s comments). The private posts probably won’t start in earnest until the baby is born – to see them, I’ll have to give you a password which I’ll email out with the birth announcement. After you’ve typed the password in once, you should be able to see all of the private posts – careful though, because if you enter it on a public machine (at the library, say), everyone else will be able to see the private posts, too, which will rather defeat the point.

Let me know if you have questions and welcome to the new site!

In the “it’s the small things” category, we have a new mat for the back door and it’s beautiful:

It looks nice with our interior green walls in the living room, and each time I go out to water the plants I admire it. Our old one gave five years of steady service, but it was so worn that you couldn’t see the pattern anymore. It’s so nice to have the bright, pretty colors on the step. 🙂