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The roses are still blooming:

Our neighbours’ tree is glowing:

And the flourescent green moss is rapidly taking over the patio…

I kind of like that it coordinates so nicely with the flowerpot on the table. But seriously, we need a plan and quickly.

Aside from all of the birthday-celebrating and canal-viewing, the major purpose of the trip was to attend Kevin’s cousin’s wedding. Chris is about half a year older than Kevin and there are all sorts of childhood cousin stories (sliding down the stairs head-first at their grandparents house, etc), plus Chris and Brandy red-eyed out all the way from California to come to our wedding, so I was so happy to get to fly out to celebrate with them. Kevin was asked to be an usher and walk his grandmother down the aisle. 🙂 The church was so pretty (lots of stained glass and a pretty organ), and the wedding party was lovely – girls in dark blue, most of the guys in Marines uniforms, and bright autumn colors for the flowers. Chris and Brandy both looked so happy. We didn’t bring cameras to the church, so I don’t have any photos, unfortunately.

The reception was a few hours later, and closer to the hotel. Chris’ parents made wine, with labels that had the same photo and color theme as the save-the-dates. None of my photos came out, but I was so impressed. The cake was lovely, and they cut it with a Marines sword – wow.

It took people a little while after dinner to get excited about dancing, but once they started it was hard to tear people away. Here’s a partial family portrait – bunny ears courtesy of Kevin’s uncle Dan.

The room layout was quite clever – space for lots of tables and the a bar in the middle of the room (which you can see in the background ) that divided the entry from the dance floor. It was a pretty chilly night, but there were several french doors that led to patios, which would be lovely in the summer.

A great photo of Kevin’s parents:

Chris and Brandy did an amazing job of getting around the room to talk to everyone. I was so impressed. We meant to at our wedding and completely misjudged the time and only did a third of the room. Oops. Also in the category of things they did masterfully, their first dance:

So happy. 🙂 (In the photos of ours, I do think that you can see the clock ticking in my head – is 20 seconds enough first-dancing??) It’s so interesting to attend a wedding with still relatively recent experience in the whole thing – so many choices and it’s fun to see what other people decide to do. I’d only been to three weddings before ours (one when I was 6, one when I was eight, and one a month after we got engaged, so I think that total unfamiliarity was probably a large factor for me in our planning process. I was not necessarily the most opinionated bride out there, flowers and invitations aside (and I was frequently sort of horrified by the constant wedding buzz and all of the expectations around being a bride). And yet, I do love seeing other people’s weddings especially now that ours is past, and I can’t tell you how much I enjoy remembering “our way” of doing things. It’s such fun. I loved our wedding, our vows, and all of the people who came to celebrate it with us. Yay for such memorable occasions, and the family and friends that make them matter. 🙂

Once we’d booked tickets for the wedding and I was mapping routes from the airport to the hotel, I was startled to find that the route passed a national park (?!). Huh. (Looking at this map, you can see why I think of them as a Western phenomenon).

I don’t think that Kevin and I have too many stated joint life goals, but visiting all of the national parks is one of them. So what a fun surprise to get one for free on this trip!! The more I read, the more excited I got about it. The park is essentially a wilderness area that surrounds the Cuyahoga River, which is gorgeous in of itself but particularly interesting as the river was diverted in the 1820s and 30s to create the Erie canal. (Upon further research, it’s not the Erie canal of fame and the kid’s song, which was built in New York, but the Ohio & Erie canal. Same concept and still cool.)

We only had a few hours so we went to the Brandywine Falls. It’s apparently a “bridal veil” falls – appropriate since there was a (huge) wedding party taking photos when we arrived.

Fun to see all of their dresses and flowers. 🙂 The walk around the falls was very national parks, with wooden trails to different scenic areas. Here’s Kevin’s family with the falls:

And Neen with some of the neat, neat rocks that lined the trail:

The path led up next to and then over the top of the falls. It’s such a pretty, relatively tiny creek compared to all of that water. The leaves were still almost all green – I imagine that they will be flaming and gorgeous in a few weeks. We’d see a branch here and there that was scarlet or yellow in the sun, but the real color was still a ways out. There was an inn on the opposite back — looks like a pretty gorgeous place to come spend a weekend. I would have loved more time to explore.

Kevin zoomed back to the rehearsal, and the rest of us drove north through the park to the Canal Visitor Center (sadly, closed, though we got to see one of the locks and there were lots of educational signs). The crickets when we got out were something else. Each step would send about twenty leaping to safety. I’ve never seen anything like them – crazy Ohio Cuyahoga Valley crickets. 🙂

Some stats: The Cleveland to Akron canal rose 395 feet over 309 miles and 44 locks. It was completed in 1832. The lock we saw could raise a boat nine feet. Apparently, Akron had 21 locks over two miles, and it took boats 6 hours to get through them. It took 80-90 hours to cross the entire state.

My overwhelming impression of the whole thing was how tiny it was. The lock we were standing at looked about 12’ in width. The fact that something like that could alter the entire economy of a region is mind bending. And you picture the animals pulling the barges across the state in from the great lakes, and it’s a very powerful image. But then, you think how long it would take to dig those trenches by hand (can you imagine?) over so many miles, and the project seems huge. And, on top of all of that, it was only a few decades before the railroads put the canals out of business and you realize how fast our country was changing. I thought the whole thing was terribly interesting.

We left on Wednesday evening for a trip to Ohio to celebrate Kevin’s cousin’s wedding. The timing was pretty awesome, because we also got to be there for Kevin’s Dad’s 50th birthday. Given that we generally have to celebrate all of the family milestones at a distance, it was a treat to get to be there for the real day (though I suspect we’ve set a high travel bar for Kevin’s mom’s 50th next fall…).

We red-eyed to the tiny (10 gate) Canton Akron Airport on Wednesday, via O’Hare. The early part of the trip was interesting, since we found an entirely new wing of the SeaTac airport – I didn’t realize that we still had any unexplored corners of it, by this point. It was sort of surreal to uncover new territory. Our O’Hare connecting flight kept being pushed back by 40 min for assorted reasons (no plane, no crew x2, and then some sort of mechanical failure), so it was about three hours after scheduled departure that we finally took off. I finally bought a neck pillow in the Seattle airport, which turned out to be one of the best purchases ever, and stole a pillow from United (I would have felt more guilt if they didn’t charge $15 to check a single suitcase), and so I think I managed almost 6 hours of sleep between the flights and the airport floor in Chicago. Not terrible, as these things go, though landing in the middle of the country at 2:45 am PST/4:45 am “real” time is still one of those out-of-body experiences to me.

We beat Kevin’s parents to the hotel by about 20 minutes – time for one and a half showers. We were planning to get there about 3-4 hours early and nap. Oops. At least we made it, and happily our luggage arrived as expected. We went out to a seafood and steak place for Kevin’s Dad’s birthday – delicious. It ended up being quite the group, with Kevin’s grandmother, Marge and Norm (the groom’s parents), and Kevin’s cousins Jackie and Joanna, plus her boyfriend Dana. Kevin Sr. and Neen at the restaurant:

Debbie and Marge:

A few cocktails in, everyone had a great time with Kevin’s camera. 🙂 (We may have had to delete some of these gems to make room for the photos for the rest of the trip…)

And wishing on the fiftieth birthday candle… (note reading glasses on head 🙂 )

Kevin got a photo of our Stellar Jay on the front path.

He’s quite a character, bathing in our gutters and flitting about the yard.

Kevin paid off the last of his student loans today. 🙂

(There he is with the hated website – in one of those great puns/ironies, it was down “for service” constantly.)

Woohoo!

I have always been a bit of a hoarder – someone who forms emotional attachments to things that I own. In one of the spheres that this makes the least sense (technology), I cling even more strongly and keep things well beyond their shelf date. Probably not an uncommon flaw. My ’92 walkman was in constant use until ’03. My ’95 stereo (with dual cassette, 3 cd changer, and am-fm radio) is still sitting in our dining room, much to Kevin’s chagrin.

My parents gave me a monitor for my 21st birthday. That sentence is so blasé, but the import to me at the time was enormous. It was an affirmation for me of how proud my parents were of my impending college degree, and a recognition of how much time I spent working in front of the computer . I was just coming off of a Microsoft internship and starting my senior year as a computer science major. Kevin (who I’d just barely started dating) was jealous. Having something at the leading edge was a deep thrill. Plus (and I cannot overstate how cool this was) – I was so happy not to heft my 19″ CRT up three flights of stairs to my dorm room. Yay, LCD!!! There’s something to be said for hauling crates of textbooks and treating the feather light computer as the bonus round.

Six years later, though, especially given how frequently I work at home, I’m ready for more screen real estate. I’ve been clinging to my 17″ LCD because I love it, but something finally clicked in the sensible portion of my brain two weeks ago and I’m ready for much, much bigger.

Here’s the old, wonderful 17″ monitor:

Here are the two side-by-side.

Note how tiny the 17″ screen is (despite the larger frame). Crazy. And here’s the new monitor, displaying side-by-side word docs with plenty of space to spare.

WOW. How very cool. And Kevin keeps coming into my room and exhaling in wistful, covetous sighs…Yay for still occasionally being the one to up the technological ante.

When we switched to the Amanda-and-Brian lights for our tank, our old light stand no longer worked. This has many repercussions – it’s harder to do daily maintenance and cleaning on the tank, airflow suffers so the lights heat up more than they would if they were lofted (and the water below them heats up more, too), and the water in the tank doesn’t oxygenate as well because there’s less airflow over the surface. Also, while Kevin was able to get one of the light fans to work, the other one seems to be shorted out, and probably not worth fixing. This shortens the life of the bulb and raises the temp of the fixture.

I’ve been trying for the last two months to find prefabricated stands that would support the lights above the water, to no avail. The light brand is Finnex – totally unheard of by google, except for integrated systems (where you buy the tank, stand, lights, filtration, etc as a package). The Finnex lights that we have present a single dock in the middle of each end to anchor a stand, but are completely incompatible with any of the other commercial lights’ stands on the market today. After many hopeful internet and store-based searches, I finally decided to craft a homemade solution.

I decided to use wood as the pedestal to support a metal brace at each end of each light. Experimenting in the hardware aisle, I found that 1½ door hinges fit perfectly into the light braces. I also found that two ¾” x ½” corner braces per wood pedestal would support it along the top of the tank.
Kevin used the Sawzall to cut the steel into sections according to my measurements. Then, for the first time really, I used the drill for a long series of assembly. (Usually the heavy power drill is Kevin’s – it was a good confidence boost to learn to use it over the course of this project.)
For both lights, the entire lift system required 32 screws, into hard to balance 1″x1″x2.5″ wood blocks. My first version was too tall, and the lights cast too much against the wall and not enough into the water.

I spent a while unscrewing fixtures, cutting down blocks by an inch, and then rescrewing.

Here’s the inspired door-hinge solution in action.

The hinge slips through the channel at the end of the light, and then I used plastic zip ties to cinch in the two ends of the hinge around the steel support.

There are many advantages – it’s stable, you can slide the light front-to-back, and if we need to remove the light from the support it’s a quick scissor cut and then cheap and simple to replace.

Once I was happy with the height, I whipped out the sewing machine to create black shields for the front of the tank to block the light in the gap. After a little bit of experimentation, I filled them with poster board. This was a dumb decision, since paper will be brought down by salt water evaporation. How stupid of me. When these wilt, as they inevitably will, I’ll replace the paper filling with felt. In any case, the fabric shades are attached to the wooden posts with adhesive velcro tabs.

The weather has calmed down a bit since I set up this system, but still: way fewer/less-dramatic temp spikes in the tank due to better airflow, and a reduction of algae during hot periods. A success already. 🙂

So, astute blog readers (who check in despite the constant lulls in posting) will have noticed that I have finished 3 knitting projects in the last two days, which leaves me with only 2 projects on the needles. Isn’t that amazing?

The first is a pair of socks. Conwy from Knitting on the road, knit in the lovely Trekking XXL blue blend. I’m post-heel on sock 1. A great pattern, a great yarn, just needs some attention:

The second is a sleeveless top that I put aside a little over two years ago when I finished both front and back and realized no matter how you stretched them, they were each 13″ wide. A gauge debacle. The fabric is gorgeous, though (the yarn is super-cheap Handwork Cora that I bought off elann.com for about $2 a ball – gorgeous for lacework, and I would buy more in an instant if I could find it). I didn’t want to rip. I’m completely torn.

(Can you tell it’s been hot here? Poor toasty geraniums.) A gorgeous top, in theory. A few days ago, I suddenly realized how I might repurpose it, and now I am all aflame with knitting potential. I’ll keep you posted.

All of the knitting fervour is well-timed, since the Olympics begin tomorrow!!! Yay! Since we bought the house in October, we actually haven’t had a TV set up for more than a few days, so I was feeling sad about missing all of the broadcasts. But then Microsoft and NBC collaborated on a site: www.NbcOlympics.com.
There’s going to be on-demand video for all of the events, news, records, schedules, etc. Since my favourite events are all of the pool ones (swimming, diving, synchronized swimming), and I’m totally content to watch the heats, this is shaping up to be the 7th heaven Olympics. I’m foreseeing plenty of sports voyeurism and knitting in my near future. Summer knitting challenge: down to one project by the end of the games??

PS: Happy residential anniversary to us!!! On August 8th ’04, we arrived in Washington state to settle. We’re still here. We’ve bought property. The mountains are still uplifting each time I see them. Here’s to such a happy four years and many more!

PPS: It’s 8/8/08 today. For number fans, it’s a good day. (You may choose to celebrate at 8:08 or 12:34…. :-))

It broke 80 today for the second day in a row, and it would amuse me to see all of the Microsoftees still dressed in their jeans and long-sleeved layers (habits die hard) if I wasn’t similarly overheated. I think we’re collectively less prepared than usual for the inevitable hot streak after such a cold spring and then the last week and a half of clouds, low-60s, and drizzle.

The fish are hanging in. The “fish room”/kitchen stay reasonably cool until late afternoon, but we’ve been battling a temperature spike in the late afternoons. We allow more temperature fluctuation than is really ideal, but we try to keep things around 79°. Today, between 4:45 and 6:00, the tank rose from 80.1° to 81.2°. The dudes aren’t really designed to deal with that, so I went into tank-cooling mode. We already put a fan on when we’re at work to cool off the lights and promote evaporation (which is cooling). I did a water change, which dropped the temp .9°, but it started to climb again quickly. I filled a nalgene bottle with ice, added a bit of cold water, and put it in the refugium – a few tenths of a degree! I’m making big ice cubes using our dechlorinated tap water (I really should have done this on Sunday) – a series of those in the refugium in the 5-7pm stretch makes a huge difference. And I turned off the white lights to cut down on heat for a few hours. Here are the dudes swimming in the blue light, wondering at all of the tank activity.

Luckily the corals and fish all look relatively happy and unstressed, given the circumstances.

Kevin came home from work and retired to the birthday present hammock. 🙂

He’s doing a good job of making me feel like it’s going to be a good gift, despite presenting it on a day when it was mid-50s and drizzly. It’s from LL Bean, and the frame folds up VERY easily for storage/car camping. It weighs a million pounds, but it’s sturdy, so that’s okay. We’ve been bringing it in at night as far as the living room, but so far it’s in constant enough use that it’s just in and out through the back door.

You can also see my planters in the foreground. I planted these a few weeks ago, and they are really a treat and going strong. The one on the left is a pink (Berseba) Hiemalis Begonia, a red (Tango) geranium, Golden Creeping Jenny (Lysimachia Aurea), and a white impatiens. The one on the left is an orange/peach (Catrin) Hiemalis Begonia, a red (Tango) geranium, Creeping Golden Marjoram, and a mystery plant that has reflowered for the third summer. The flowers are vivid, and I am so enthusiastic – they make me happy every time I walk by. The Creeping Jenny is particularly exceptional — grows nicely without getting gangly and is a lovely accent to the dark green and red of the geraniums. I’m a huge fan.

Also, the tomato plants are huge and the leaves look happy, but we need pollinators! Our biology lab friend Sanna suggested that we find a dead bumblebee and use it to pollinate the flowers, so now I’m on the lookout.