Portlanding

This weekend Andy and I drove down to Portland.  Partially to celebrate the 4.0 I got on my Otis the Farmer assignment (go me!), partially to keep from going stir crazy, and partially because both of our laptops were on their way out and we wanted to get a MacBook.  Which I am now typing on, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Mini road trips are not unusual to me.  Every year my dad eventually gets the overwhelming urge to dip his feet in the ocean, and so there is a day trip out to the coastal beaches and much cold salt water, and I have accompanied on many occasion.  This sort of trip is scientifically proven to be good for you.  I know because I am a biologist.  So!  It turns out Andy and I are like this too.  Just pick up and drive somewhere for a day or so.  Take lots of pictures.  Come back ready for the work week again.  It clears out cobwebs and repetitive thought patterns from your head.

So Saturday morning we packed up our essentials, enough to fit in one bag.  We didn't even have to put the seat down in the Mini.  We were off!  On the way down we made a stop at the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge, just outside of Olympia.  The day was beautiful, though it was rather windy, 

but it was great weather to look for birds.  There are very long trails there, which I've walked before, but we just took a shorter loop that went by a lot of the water there.  I didn't see anything new, but I did see some waterfowl I hadn't seen in a while.  Gadwalls, which look plain from a distance but actually have very fine striations in their feathers.  Northern Pintails, the males who have a striking black and white pattern, a blue U on their bills, and very long pointy tails.  Green Winged teals, who look like wannabe wood ducks with their green masks on red heads.  American Widgeon, who look like they have a bald patch on their otherwise red head.  There were also Mallards, Northern Shovelers, and plenty of Canadian geese.

In fact, after we left the refuge, we saw even more geese.  There was a huge formation of them flying over the highway.  And then all of a sudden the Mini was bombarded by high altitude poop.  Which was green.  Andy pressed the windshield washer faster than I could take a picture!

Anyhow!  We continued on our way, and the weather got darker and rainier, by the time we got to Portland it was dry, cold, and foggy.  We checked in at the beautiful downtown Hotel Lucia, which was very comfy and had lots and lots of famous photos gracing the walls.  And then we went out and walked to the Mac store and picked up this sweet sweet MacBook.  I'm still getting used to it, mostly because the keyboard shortcuts all involve the crazy little clover-shaped "command" button.  But everything is very intuitive, and holy hell everything is so fast.  Even turning on and off is lightning.  So we went out and got squash pizza from Ken's Artisan Pizza, stopped by a Safeway to get more snacks and drinks and came back to the hotel to veg out, which was awesome.

Sunday morning, after sleeping in, and after I'd started getting over a migraine, we checked out and drove out to find breakfast.  There was a little french bakery and cafe that we found called Petite Provence, and the food there was amazing.  I had berry french toast and Andy had this thing that was poached eggs on baked tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella.  Everything was delicious, and the place was very crowded, which is good.  The last time we went down to Portland we had found a waffle place that was great, but by this trip it had gone out of business!  Sometimes finding hole-in-the-wall places is a curse.

Breakfast was followed by, of course, a trip to Powell's Books.  It is a must for us every time we're in Portland.  Not like we don't already have a stack of unread books that we need to catch up on, but you can never have enough books.  You can find books for your favorite authors that have been out of print for years and years, and all the hard to find things that you'd given up on years ago.  Andy and I love that place.  It would be hard not to.  Plus they have a wall where every author that visits signs it.

After that we were on our way home!  Except for a little detour at a little-known nature preserve called the Mima Mounds.  It is a weird geological oddity just south of Olympia that no scientist has really fully explained.  I'd been there in college with an ethnobiology class, talking about the Native American's who had used the mounds to grow camas flowers for their agriculture.  I'd told Andy about it before, but it's sort of difficult to describe, so we stopped by to see it!

We got home in the early evening, and I was very exhausted but happy about our trip.  Grunty was glad we were home too.

Otis the Farmer

This picture is proof that awesome socks run in the family. Possibly it is genetic, passed down from mother to daughter.

So! I just finished another assignment for my writing class, and I decided to post it here to share it. I was given a scene to write, and had to brainstorm a list of the 5 senses related to that scene and then write an excerpt from that situation. At first I wasn't sure I could really do it, but it turns out that the exercise helped put pictures in my head and made it a lot easier to write. The result is a little scene that I'm actually sort of proud of.

***

Crows circled above, silhouetted against the approaching storm clouds, as if the farm were carrion, and Otis stood like a scarecrow, surveying what was once his acreage. The late afternoon shadows stretched across the land he had tended to, lighting the dormant green tractor with a missing wheel, like a prized but crippled racehorse put out to pasture. The land had been kind his family and to the creatures they had raised. Otis leaned against an already leaning fencepost that needed little help to follow the rest of its toppled brethren. The wind was right so you could hear the swine in the next farm over, and he smiled at the memory of chasing pigs out of his wife's vegetable garden.

Now, the garden was overrun with tangled grass and shotweed, with enough pollen to tempt a sneeze out of him from a distance. The rabbits that his wife had battled against for so many years had finally outlived her, and he could hear them scrabble against the siding of the farmhouse as they worked at their burrows. The faint metal clank of a skewed, at one time cheerfully tinkling windchime hanging at the edge of the garden made Otis straighten up.

"Another storm coming," he said conversationally, though he couldn't say to whom. He could taste the acrid ozone in the breeze and knew that rain would soon follow.

Shifting his weight made his boots squelch in the mud beneath them, a slight sucking from the muck protesting his departure as he moved towards the house he had built for dear Mabel. It had stood for a lifetime while they raised their boys and tended their goats, modest like their living but secure and a shelter from turmoil. The feel of the nails embedding into the wood, holding their home together was imprinted into his palms just as the soil that never quite came out from his nailbeds. Loose shutters knocked leisurely, waving at Otis to beckon him inside, to see through the bubbled and waved thick panes of glass from the inside one last time. He turned away from the welcoming wraparound porch before he could clearly see the flaking white paint that he knew thickly coated the wood.

The same wind that had toyed with those tarnished windchimes then found its way through the disheveled slats of the red barn, which had listed to the left dangerously when the flood waters had come. One of the green doors hung off its hinges, stuck in the mud and unable to close. Had any of the goats been left, there would have been no keeping them warm and dry. As he stood in the doorway he could hear the faint hum of a wasps nest somewhere in the rafters, working stoically as he used to, and the scent of moulding hay struck him in its cloying, sickly sweetness. If he breathed in deeply, there was still the faint scent of goat, somewhere between manure, sweat, and grass.

A clunking rhythm had caught his attention, a system that used to work rhythmically but now teetered strangely, the windmill that was now one blade short couldn't find a full rotation in the wind. The mechanisms inside of it creaked and strained, pleading to deliver more water from the well. He knows if he listens he could hear the river from there, not a babbling brook by any means, but a threatening constant like the many wings of a murder of crows. It would rise again and overfill its banks, but this time he would not be witness as it scoured away at the earth.

***

And now! Another adorable picture of Grunty, tucked into bed.

Mad Writing and Cooking Storms

Work has been taking up a ton of my time, it feels like I only get a couple of hours a day to do what I want to do sometimes. So while I've been working I've also enrolled in an online short story writing class. I did two work weeks back-to-back with no break since I worked last weekend, so I happen to have a four day weekend this week to make up for it.

I really am enjoying this writing class because it's putting me back into writing-mode. It's a certain way of thinking that I haven't been able to do for a while. I feel like I lost my writing mojo, the creative drive, even my inspiration for a while. In a way, this is getting me back to basics, how to create a story, how to create characters. One of the biggest helps is the fact that I've been having to keep a daily writing journal. I don't always write about stories, but I at least have a place to jot down ideas and phrases and observations that I could potentially use later.

It's been nice having a studio to go to and work. Right now in addition to our apartment we're renting a small office in a building not far from us to use for Andy's art and my writing. It's a building owned by UW Tacoma, but until they begin renovating it they're renting out the office space. The studio we're renting is small, but the person who rented it before we did was a massage therapist and that person made it a very nice space. Nice carpets, a mirrored wall to make it seem bigger, covered the hideous wood panel walls with cloth. There's even lighting with dimmer switches. It's very quiet there, a nice place to think. Every time I sit at the desk, where Andy keeps his paintbrushes, I want to take pictures of them.

Yesterday was my first day off in forever, and I decided I wanted to cook dinner, since really Andy had taken care of all of it since I kept coming home so exhausted. So last night I made lentil soup with bacon. And I loved it. I had gotten beluga lentils from PFI and hadn't gotten a chance to use them yet. I found the recipe through Tastespotting, and it's probably one of the favorite things I've ever made.

Lentil Soup

Ingredients
2 T butter
3 T extra virgin olive oil
3 strips of thick maple bacon cut into 1inch squares
1/3 cup diced onion, 1/3 cup diced celery, 1/3 cup diced carrot (mirepoix what what)
1 can diced tomatos with juice
1 cup beluga lentils (rinsed and drained)
4 cups chicken stock
salt and pepper

1. In a large soup pot, add butter, olive oil, bacon, and mirepoix on medium-high heat, cook and stir until onions are golden but not brown.
2. Add tomatoes and juices, stir to combine and reduce heat to medium. Cook for about 20 minutes until the tomatoes begin to brown and most of the juice has evaporated.
3. Add the rinsed and drained lentils to the pot, stir to mix.
4. Add the chicken stock and stir, season with salt and pepper. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce to a low simmer.
5. Cook the lentils for 30 minutes, or until tender. May have to add more stock or water towards the end if it has evaporated too quickly.
6. Serve and enjoy!

Lentils are very good for you, the third highest protein of any vegetable, behind soybeans and hemp. Also high in iron, and essential amino acids! The amazing lentil. Anyhow, now I am working on some vanilla scones and I plan on making pork tenderloin tonight, so I'm sure there will be more posts and photos of my cooking adventures.

Naked City

We've had a lot of fun since the snow melted and we've been able to get out and about again. Of course, right now instead of snow there is rain, and massive amounts which is flooding pretty much every river ever, but that's another story, maybe I'll get some pictures.

Anyway, some of Andy's buddies were in town all at once for the holidays, so it was a great chance to get together and see everybody. I didn't get a ton of pictures because I hate using flash and I always seemed to be under low light conditions, but I did get Andy with Aaron Burch and his beautiful girlfriend Elizabeth. Aaron is one of Andy's buddies who is right now getting his masters and runs a writing journal called Hobart Pulp. They are both very cool people and it was good to see them. One night we got together at a bar in Seattle and the next day we got together with everyone else who couldn't make it for lunch. So we got to see Brad and Heather, Wes and Megan, Aaron and Elizabeth and her daughter Andie(sp?). It was a bad photography day, but let me just say that it was really fun.

So it was one night not long after Christmas that we went up to Greenwood in Seattle to meet up with everybody at Naked City Taphouse, which is a bar that one of Andy's friends, Donald, opened just a few months ago. I really liked the place, it was the first time we'd been up there. Naked City is a film noir reference, and yes they've heard every nudity joke before. And it just so happens that Andy made the logo they're using! Which I've heard has been a real success. There's shirts and everything with the mysterious man in shadows with the sweet hat.

They're working on putting their own brewery together in their back rooms, which will be great given how the stout they made tastes. They're more focused on beer, and have a wide selection of beer from local breweries. The selection is always changing, and whenever one tap goes out, another keg takes its place. They have some bar food, though the focus is the beer, but what's nice is that with the absence of a deep fryer, you get much more unique and delicious things like giant soft pretzels and cheeeese.

Definitely a place to check out if you're ever in Seattle. So I hope everyone else is having a good start to their new year. We're having a strange start. Rothko somehow got giardia? He's on some medication now and it should go away easily, but everyone, including our vet, is baffled as to how he got that. He's feeling fine now. The punk. Grunty says Happy New Year!

Tacoma Wearing a Blanket

Mostly this is a post about the last two weeks so that I can share a bunch of my snow-in-Tacoma pictures with people.

It's interesting how a city changes when it's blanketed in snow. Especially in downtown Tacoma, all the snow made it feel like we were the only people around. In fact, as we were walking the only other person we ran into was a photographer for the News Tribune. I remember snow like this when I was little, but even the snow we had a couple of years ago wasn't as heavy as this. We wound up getting about four inches, then a quarter inch of ice, and then another couple of inches. We got it a lot better than most people, but it was impossible to leave the apartment by car for a few days. Especially since we have a Mini Cooper and it just doesn't have the things you need for driving in snow.

There's a bit of controversy right now about Seattle and their methods of clearing snow and ice from roads. See, they don't actually use salt because of environmental concerns. Instead they have rubber-tipped snowplows that compact the snow and ice, and then sand trucks to give traction. This is rather silly from a toxicology standpoint because from my understanding the fresh water sources around here suffer from turbidity more than they would from salt. Turbidity caused by runoff of silt and sand. So it's still difficult to get around because the plows are lame and our Mini doesn't have four wheel drive or much clearance. Some side roads are still ice blocks with huge ruts and mostly impassable for us.

We had fun with it, though after a few days both of us were tired of it. I was actually looking forward to going to work so that I could just get out of the house and go somewhere else for a while. You could tell a lot of people felt cooped up by the snow. Work was a lot slower as we ended more and more tests before the holidays. Since everybody was going sort of stir crazy, we all decided to have a bit of fun. Though it was mostly Eric doing the construction, there soon was a snowman standing in front of our lab. Soon followed the next day by a 15 foot snow... sentinel tower.

So now things are starting to melt, which is good because we really need to go grocery shopping again. It was beautiful while it lasted, and when we visited Andy's folks at American Lake for Christmas Day, the lake was still as glass except for all the Northern Shovelers and gorgeous as the sun was setting.

A Very Merry Eve eve

It's a white Christmas this year! Though it is starting to melt and get sort of dirty and nasty. I'm actually pretty ready for it to melt. It's a tradition in my family to open presents on Christmas Eve eve, so tonight was our giving night.

Instead of doing normal shopping and gift-giving presents this year with my family, we donated to different charities in each other's names. I was very excited to do this, because I didn't get to volunteer my time to stuff stockings like I wanted to. I found it great to look and see what local charities there were and to sort of match them up with my parents and with my brother Lee and his fiancee, Kelley.

For my parents we donated in their name to Scholarship America; my parents are both the first generation in their families to go to college, so they know the value of education and how hard it is for young people to do it. Also I remember during this financial class I took with my mom a long while ago, we were asked to write down a ton of goals and what we'd want to do with our cash if we had a choice, and I vaguely remember one of her goals was to set up a scholarship, which was something I didn't know and surprised me so I remembered it. For my bro and Kelley, we donated in their name to Fare Start, which is a very cool charity in Seattle that takes people who are homeless and helps them with job training in the culinary world so they might have the chance to change their own lives. With Lee and Kelley both being foodies, both love Seattle, and their giving nature, this was perfect for them.

That being said, Grunty the snow elf wishes everyone a Merry Christmas!

Hot Cocoa and Christmas Trees

We have been drinking so much hot cocoa I have considered buying a Costco pack, which is a 70 count box. It is very cold out. I know this is coming from someone who has lived in rather mild-weathered western Washington for most her life, and I've never been in Minnesota or Michigan or wherever you snow-people live, and I admit I am sometimes a cold wuss. But right now I'm watching the news and they're talking about 2-12" of snow in Tacoma and 50-70 mph winds. I get to complain a teensy bit. For where we live this is pretty bad weather, and worse is that most folks don't know how to deal with it.

So we went out and got some groceries so we're well-stocked before the storm this weekend, luckily we're in a good area and it's unlikely we'd lose power. We plan on making a bunch of cookies this weekend! And staying in and watching movies, and enjoying our pretty Christmas tree.

We'd gone to the Honeytree Farm and cut down our own tree, which was a fun experience because we had to find a tree that would fit inside a Mini Cooper. There was a bunch of running back and forth with a tape measurer. We found a little Noble fir cramped in a corner by a big pine tree that had stunted its growth. The tree farmers had a good laugh as we bundled it in black trash bags and stuck it in the back of the Mini, with my seat slid as close to the dashboard as possible. My biggest requirement for a U-Cut Christmas tree farm is free hot chocolate for after your hunt.

This is most likely because in my family we went to this U-Cut farm often after the sun had set, making cutting trees a very cold, flashlight-driven affair. After we had chosen our tree and cut it down, which we often found bird nests in later on, we would go inside where there was a wood stove, free hot chocolate, and miniature candy canes. It's tough to break that sort of habit.

Given my penchant for birds, and that I was married in a bird-themed wedding, it's only appropriate that we have a bird-themed tree. This isn't a new thing, we've been hanging our tree with birds since before we were engaged. It mostly started because Andy didn't have a lot of ornaments so I folded a flock of origami cranes to perch on the branches. From there things just sort of took off. Pun intended.

And when I complained that our tree had only three lonesome ball ornaments, my buddies came through. Turtle, from work, gave us so many we should get a larger tree next year. Tam sent me a beautiful painted crane ornament, and cheerful new shiny shiny shiny bulbs.

It's a good thing we planned on getting a small tree this year, too. Partially it was because we wanted to be able to fit it inside the Mini, but also this is our first year with a Christmas tree and a cat. A cat who tends to get into things. So we're able to put this little tree on top of our big drafting table and have finally gotten it to a point where Grunty can't jump up to make friends. He kept trying to climb it while Andy was putting the lights on it. And when he couldn't climb it, he tried to eat it.