Insomnia and archival-grade photo paper

Last Monday night was somewhat weird and psychedelic for Mike and me.  I went to bed promptly at 10pm with thoughts of getting up early and going running.  And I couldn’t sleep.  I really couldn’t.  I tossed and turned until Mike came to bed close to midnight.

“I can’t sleep,” I informed him.

“Yeah, I’m not tired either,” he said.  We talked for awhile and then tried to fall asleep.  Neither of us had any luck and at 1:15am we were both still awake.  Since nothing was happening in the sleep department I threw off the covers, got my workout clothes on, and went downstairs to the workout room and ran on the treadmill for an hour.  Mike suggested I do Wii Zumba instead, but I figured the sure way to make sure Mike really got no sleep was to play African music loud enough to dance to.  So the treadmill it was.  It was a little weird being in the workout room all by myself in the middle of the night, but I learned a couple of really useful things.  1) The heat to the workout room turns off at night (at midnight maybe?) so the workout room gets nice and cool… perfect for when you’re running.  I think they have the heat set in that workout room too high… half the time when I go in there after work the heater is blowing from the ceiling right down on my head.  Hardly what you want when you’re already sweating like crazy.  So running after the heat had turned off was definitely a nice surprise.  2)  There are apparently no second shift workers who are fitness nuts living in the apartment building, because I literally didn’t see a soul from the time I left our apartment until the time I returned an hour later.  3)  Running at night when I can’t sleep helps reset my body.  When I got back to the apartment I took a quick shower, hopped back into bed next to an almost-asleep Mike and a very-asleep Piper, and fell asleep almost instantly.

Mondays are interesting.  I feel like they’re difficult at work for both Mike and me.  Somehow our entire brain capacity gets used up during the workday on Monday and we come home pretty tired.  Great example: yesterday was a Monday.  I came home from work and attempted to make hard-boiled eggs.  Making hard-boiled eggs is literally one of the easiest things possible to make in the kitchen.  It’s basically akin to boiling water.  Actually, it’s literally akin to boiling water.  I put the eggs in a big pot filled with water, bring it to a boil, remove it from heat and let it sit for 15 minutes, and then put the eggs in cold water.  Easy.  A couple nights ago when making eggs, however, once the water came to a boil, rather than letting the pot sit for 15 minutes with the hot water in it, I prompted dumped all the hot water out of the pot and proceeded to submerse the eggs in frigid water.  Then I returned to my computer with the vague feeling that something didn’t seem right.  Two minutes later, my brainpower apparently returned, and I realized I hadn’t actually let the eggs cook in the hot water for 15 minutes.  I tried to remedy my mistake, thinking that if I got them in hot water again maybe I could cook them in that.  In my efforts to avoid overcooking them (since they’d already been heated to boiling once), I ended up undercooking them and ended up with soft-boiled eggs in the shell.  Which are pretty disgusting, actually, since when you break the shell open, half-cooked egg yolk may splatter around you.  Fortunately I remedied the problem by carefully preparing new hard-boiled eggs tonight which turned out perfectly.  🙂

Another great example of absent-mindedness brought on by a combination of a tired brain and an over-reliance on modern technology: a couple nights ago I was lost in thought while using my electric toothbrush.  It stays on for two minutes, buzzing briefly every 30 seconds to prompt you to move to the next quadrant of your mouth.  I must not have been paying attention because I missed one of the buzzes and the toothbrush shut off with me having brushed only three quadrants of my mouth.  I was left staring stupidly at the toothbrush wondering what to do with the last quadrant of my mouth.  And trying unsuccessfully to remember which of the quadrants of my mouth got brushed twice.

Since I brought up cooking (although hard-boiled eggs barely qualify), I have made a couple dishes for Mike recently.  The most recent one was a simple baked chicken recipe with a soy/garlic/lime marinade.  I doubled all of the sauce ingredients (except for the soy sauce) and I served it over rice.  Mike said it was good but it needed vegetables, so the following night I sautéed up some diced onions and red peppers and mixed those in with the already-cooked chicken and sauce.  The original may not have had vegetables, but the leftovers did!  🙂

Lately I have re-discovered raw veggies and hummus.  I hadn’t had that in a long time, but to crave veggies and hummus you have to have really good hummus.  And I just found one!  If you like greek olives, this is definitely the hummus to try… it’s delicious!  Speaking of delicious, Mike

Mike has been busy the past week or so with a home project consisting of getting our TV wired up to the internet.  We were already connected to the internet, but it was via wireless and we were seeing latency and connection drops because of that.  Mike checked out the patch panel in our front closet, used a network analyzer to determine which connection in the patch panel was hooked up to the ethernet jack by the television, found appropriate cable… and the next thing I knew our TV was wired into the router without a big ugly cord stretching all the way from the TV to the router.  Awesome!  🙂  I don’t all of the steps that went into making that happen but there were multiple times where I had to step over/around black cables strewn around the apartment which were ultimately connected to some digital measuring instrument or another and multiple times during which Mike was completely unavailable because of his focus on googling various electrical and network protocol things.

Piper took the chair which is why Mike is standing…

Piper has been loving her new laser pointer lately.  Almost every night she wants either Mike or me to play laser pointer with her.  She gets so excited that her head twitches madly when we get it out.  She’s also discovered that she likes the bookcase.

Interestingly, she’s right next to a cat figurine.  And sitting on top of the mate of the candle on the left.

Usually on Fridays Mike and I are ready to just relax, but last Friday we decided to go out to a Moroccan-themed restaurant which served food prepared in a French tradition.  The restaurant was named Hunger, and the food was amazing!  Both Mike and I went for seafood entrees since apparently Morocco, being surrounded by the sea, has a history of a lot of seafood dishes.  I went with a salad with unique olives, sundried tomatoes, and very lightly smoked salmon.  Mike went all out and got seafood paella which included mussels, shrimp, and tuna in a risotto-like rice mixture.  It was all very good.  For dessert we got a scoop of homemade mint ice cream and shared it.  It totally tasted just like a fresh sprig of mint!  Very good.  Our waiter was excellent… very knowledgeable about all of the cuisine and very helpful without coming across as overbearing.  The atmosphere was amazing as well… light music playing in the background, high dark wooden ceilings, and a saying by George Eliot painted in quaint script spanning three of the ceiling beams: There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.  Presumably the restaurant was named for the quote?  It was a very pleasant and relaxing experience… I’m sure we’ll be back!

I know this picture is fuzzy… I keep thinking about a new phone with a better camera!

This weekend, after a months-long concentrated effort on Mike’s part, we finally got a framed picture from our wedding hung on the wall.  Mike started by going through the digitized version of the film negative, carefully removing any impurities he found due to the film.  Then he took it to Moon Photo, a hard-core picture-printing shop in the Greenwood area of Seattle.  The guy there printed out the photo on archival grade photo paper (which basically means that the picture will last longer than either Mike or me).  Then Mike and I went to a framing store near our house and picked out a frame and black matting for the picture.  Then we had the store frame it.  Then when it was ready to be picked up, we chose a spot on the wall for it, and Mike hung it up.  Crazy how much work went into that!  But it looks nice, which was what we were after, and it’s only a 5″x7″ and hung in the entry hall so it doesn’t look too prominent in our apartment.  The last thing you want people seeing when they enter your house is a giant framed photograph of yourselves.  I’m not entirely sure what kind of impression that conveys, but I’m pretty confident it’s not an impression I want to convey.

In other news, Mike and I are buying a limited membership to the Seattle symphony this year… I’m excited to hear some concerts… the couple of times we’ve gone the music has been just beautiful!

I hope everyone else is having a wonderful week so far!  🙂

A woolly mammoth tusk and ornamental buttons

We had SNOW in Seattle on Saturday!  Crazy!  The second time in a single winter!  (I can sense everyone from the midwest sending massive eye rolls in my direction since I don’t think you guys have had less than a foot of snow all winter.)  Still, it was a big deal for Mike and me to look out of our window late Friday night and see giant fluffy snowflakes coming down!  Gorgeous and especially nice since the following day was Saturday and we could easily stay indoors until the snow melted.  The snow had melted by early afternoon on Saturday, so we were able to run a few errands.

I haven’t been cooking a lot lately, primarily because the beef in the beef stroganoff I made last week ended up too tough and I had to throw half of it out.  Cooking disappointments always result in my feeling like I’ve wasted money on ingredients and take away my motivation to cook.  I rallied a little tonight, though, and made a chicken and veggie dish.  I made modifications to it based on what I thought would be good and based on what reviewers suggested.  I added chopped garlic cloves and 1/4 cup of sliced onion.  I also used chicken broth instead of water.  Last, I added garlic powder and extra rosemary and thyme, because seriously, more spices are always better.  🙂  Mike worked late today, so he ended up eating dinner in Everett before he came home so he hasn’t tried any yet, but he thought the house smelled good when he got home and he can have some heated up tomorrow night.

I asked Mike if he wanted to do anything for Valentine’s Day tomorrow and he looked at me incredulously.

“You mean celebrate the day of St. Valentine?  What’s up with him anyway?  Some saint who made love potions or something?  Why would we celebrate his day?”

I took that to mean that Mike probably didn’t want to do anything to celebrate.  😉

Sunday was mostly a relaxation day for Mike and me although of course there were the ever-present chores like dish-washing and laundry.  Mike spent most of the afternoon in his music studio room messing with a bookshelf (this is the same bookshelf that required reinforcement last week).  He emerged around 5pm beaming and ready to talk about his project.

“How’s it going?” I asked, even though I was fuzzy on exactly what he was doing.

“I forgot how much I love I love epoxy.  This new epoxy is so much better than it used to be too.  The bottle is much higher quality,” he said.  “Can you put some dish soap in my hands so I don’t get epoxy all over the dish soap bottle?”

I complied and then he headed off to wash his hands, still happy about the current state of epoxy in the world.

Mike and I ordered new electric toothbrushes in the interest of basic human hygiene (our old ones were years old and pretty dingy).  They have arrived, but Mike said that we should run down the batteries in our current electric toothbrushes before we throw them away since batteries can be corrosive (and they’re somehow less corrosive if they’ve been drained?  I don’t really know… this is why I’m a software engineer instead of a hardware engineer).  However, running the batteries out is turning out to be much harder than either Mike or I had anticipated.  We assumed that the batteries would run out in a day or two if the toothbrush wasn’t resting in its charger, but apparently the battery chargers for those toothbrushes were better engineered than Mike and I gave them credit for.  I’ve used my toothbrush twelve times since I unplugged it (which equates to about six days), and it’s STILL going strong.  Crazy!  Mike said he’ll figure out some way to drain the batteries fully this weekend.  I suggested just repeatedly turning on the toothbrush until it stops turning on, but Mike thinks there’ll be a better way.

Speaking of Mike’s electrical know-how, I bought a laser pointer for Piper at the pet store the other day since her old one got messed up and stopped working.  Mike put in the batteries and played with Piper last evening, and Piper LOVED it.  (Note to anyone who has a cat: you must get a laser pointer.  It is so cheap and provides hours of enjoyment.)  After Mike had finished playing with Piper I asked where the spare batteries for the laser pointer were so that I could put them away safely.

Mike looked at me blankly.  “What spare batteries?”

“The laser pointer comes with three.  So there should be two spares.”

“What are you talking about?  The laser pointer takes all three.”

Now it was my turn to fix him with a blank stare.  “What?  Really?  No way.  I only put one in her last laser pointer and it worked.”

Mike rolled his eyes.  “Yeah, and it broke after a month and only worked sporadically.  You really only put one battery in it?”

“Yes… why would a tiny laser pointer take three batteries??”

“I don’t know, but the directions clearly show the steps for putting three batteries in the laser pointer.  Didn’t you look at the directions?”

I glared at him.  “Clearly that’s a rhetorical question.  You know I didn’t.  You know I don’t even read the directions for household appliances, so why on earth would I read the directions for a two-dollar cat toy?”

“I don’t know, but if you had read the directions the original laser pointer would probably still work.”

I tried my best to come up with a good retort but failed.

Speaking of cats, a friend of mine introduced me to the Simon’s Cat series of videos on youtube.com, and I am completely hooked.  Mike and I crack up watching every one of them because they remind us so much of Piper.  Here’s one of my favorites (mostly because this is exactly how Piper acts when Mike and I try to watch TV!).  🙂

In other crazy Seattle news, a woolly mammoth tusk was unearthed literally three blocks from where I work and three blocks from where Mike and I used to live!  How weird is that?  If you click through, you can see pictures of it.  It is indeed mammoth, as one would expect from a woolly mammoth.

The weather in Seattle has finally gotten back to its normal (relatively) warm, drizzly, windy self, and Mike and I are back to carrying umbrellas everywhere we go.  Honestly, I’m not disappointed.  Even though it was nice seeing clear blue skies every day, it wasn’t a good trade for temperatures that were ten to twenty degrees lower than normal.

This weekend Mike and I are having a friend over for dinner, and I’ve been trying to think of something to make for dessert… any suggestions??  Preferably something easy and quick, but also something a little elegant.  Oh, and also something with few leftovers.  Now that Mike’s trying to eat healthier, he doesn’t like us keeping as much junk food in the house.  Let me know if there are any ideas!  🙂

In other news, Mike and I are tentatively planning on the third week in April for our England/Ireland trip.  We’re already getting excited!  Work has been busy for both of us the past month or so (ever since the holidays, really), and I think we’re both ready for a break.  We are also very ready to see a little more of the world.  Mike’s prompting me to get a new iPhone before I go, since the new one takes pictures that are SO much better than the ones my old one takes (my old one is three years old, but keeps plugging away even though it’s much slower and needs to be rebooted much more frequently than it used to).  Also, my old iPhone can’t go on the European networks at all, whereas Mike’s newer one (and any newer one I buy) can.  I’m considering that and considering the better pictures I could be taking using it, but I’m still not in a big hurry to spend a bunch of money on one.  We’ll see!

This is a strange thing to be concerned about, but I feel like I can still smell onions and garlic on myself and my clothes since cooking up the chicken and veggies and I feel like when I go to bed tonight I’m going to make the sheets smell like onion.  But I can’t tell whether this is real, or whether I’m just paranoid.  Probably time for a shower regardless, right?  🙂

I am a little annoyed with myself because I broke a button off of the cuff of my coat yesterday.  The button is primarily ornamental, except that it holds one end of an (also ornamental) strap on the cuff on.  So without the button the cuff strap flops around.  Why was I so hard on the cuff (all those trips to the grocery store where I carried heavy grocery bags on my forearms during the walk home probably didn’t help)?  Why are those ornamental buttons for ornamental cuffs even on the coat anyway?  What’s wrong with a purely functional coat that only contains buttons where it needs buttons to hold things closed?  (This is a purely rhetorical question since I of course bought the coat and thus must have been ok with the cuff button before I broke it off.)  And much more importantly than all of these questions: am I a good enough seamstress to get the button back on without it looking like a patchwork job?  (Stay tuned for the answer to this one, because I’m giving it a try this weekend.)

I almost missed the bus this morning because it was on time.  I have grown so accustomed to the bus being three minutes late that I only go down to the bus stop around the time it’s actually due.  As it was I had to make a mad sprint for the bus, but I managed to catch it so all was well.  I guess I really shouldn’t plan my morning around the bus being late anymore.  🙂

One thing I’m loving this month: Starbucks tall half caff Americanos with no room.  Every Friday I treat myself to one at the Starbucks a block away from my office.  So tomorrow’s the day!  🙂

I hope everyone has as wonderful weekend and let me know your favorite easy, quick dessert recipes if you have any!

Mike and Piper chilling

The Seahawks… a Super Bowl Victory!

On Saturday Mike went downtown to the Belltown area with a friend of his to take photos.  They were hoping for rain, but the weather remained stubbornly sunny (how often does this situation occur in February in Seattle??), so they didn’t get any of the classic Seattle rainy shots they were hoping for.  They did have a good time wandering around downtown Seattle, though.  While Mike was gone I went to the grocery store and then went down to the workout room to run on the treadmill.  I’ve been having a hard time motivating myself to run outside lately.  I think it has a lot to do with P90X ending at the end of December when the weather was already cold (and before all the Michigan people jump in about how un-cold it is in Seattle in comparison to Michigan, I realize that this is all relative).  So basically I was running outdoors in warm September weather… and then all of a sudden I was confronted with cold January weather.  It’s so much easier running throughout the winter if you start running in the fall and then get used to the cold weather gradually as you move into winter.  So anyway, I haven’t been having much luck getting on board with winter running.  I’ve been good about treadmill running, though, and feel pretty back into the swing of running (although my speed still isn’t what it was in October).  The workout room was completely empty (very unusual for a Saturday evening), so I turned on the TV and ran through two episodes of “Everybody Loves Raymond”.  Some of it was stupid, but some of it was funny enough that I laughed out loud even while running, particularly a memorable moment when Raymond ate his super bowl tickets.  🙂

Speaking of super bowls…

The Seattle Seahawks won their first EVER Super Bowl!  🙂  As most blog readers know, I am not a football fan in any sense of the term.  However, I am a fan of Seattle and the huge sense of community in the city.  For the past few weeks everyone in Seattle has been wearing Super Bowl jerseys, hats, scarves, T-shirts, etc, and ‘12th man‘ flags and signs have been flying high.  And thousands of people went down to SeaTac airport to see the Seahawks players off to the Super Bowl.  And thousands more will be attending a parade set up for Wednesday morning to celebrate the returning victors.  Seattle, a city with a sometimes surprisingly fierce sense of community, has banded around the Seahawks with such a ferocity that even non-football fans like myself are pricing out Seahawks scarves just to feel part of the community (it doesn’t hurt that I love the blue and green colors either though).  Mike and I watched the game and couldn’t believe what a shutout it was.  Peyton Manning literally didn’t get any time to line up a throw before at least one linebacker was on top of him.  That game was definitely a testament to the motto that ‘a good defense is the best offense’.  After the game, people were setting off lots of fireworks around the city, so Mike and I wandered around outside a little.  Cars were honking happily and a little crazily at each other and at other pedestrians sporting Seahawks gear and everyone was whooping and hollering.  A few miles south in the downtown area it was even crazier!  Very fun and community-centered!  I think it also helped that our team was made up of a lot of 5th and 6th string draft picks who just really worked hard and learned to operate very well as a team… we really didn’t have many “star” players.

On Friday night Mike and I went out to Paddy Coynes.  It had been such a long time since we’d been there!  Sadly, no one that we knew was working that night, but the waiters were still great.  It was definitely a relaxing evening, and got us back into our old neighborhood.  Lots of fun!  🙂  When we came back we discussed the reinforcing of our bookcase.

What happens when you get two engineers in a room…

I’ve actually been cooking lately!  A week ago I made a ground beef veggie casserole topped with cornbread.  I completely lost the recipe though… I found it on some random website, and I can’t find it again.  So unfortunately you’re all going to be deprived of the recipe.  This weekend I also made some beef stroganoff for Mike.  He thought the flavor was very good but that the stir-fry beef I put in it ended up too tough.  I’m not sure what I should have done.  Maybe stir-fry beef is really only good for cooking very quickly at very hot temperatures and isn’t good for the lower temperature/longer cooking combination I was trying to do.  I also made some lemon red lentil soup that I thought was awesome… the fresh lemon juice definitely added a lot to the taste!  I also doubled all the spices, the celery, and the carrots and added extra veggie broth…. just because you can’t have enough veggies!  🙂

You know you’re old when…

Does anyone want to fill in the blank with your own thoughts?  🙂

Here’s my most recent “I feel old” moment.  I was at American Eagle shopping for some hoodies and T-shirts (I know, I know… what do I expect shopping at AE when I’m at least ten years older than their target demographic?).  When I went to the register to pay, the girl asked if I had an AE rewards card.  I handed over my card and she stared at it blankly.

“Oh… wow.”

“Um… ‘wow’ what?” I wanted to know.

“I haven’t seen this card before… it must be one of our old cards.  Most of our current members have our new card, because they’re newer members.”

Mmm.  Just what I was looking to hear.  So basically all the AE members who joined the same time I did have moved on to other stores.  She saw the look on my face and hastened to explain further.

“You know, because most of our current customers are younger.”

Better and better.  AE’s current customer base is significantly younger than me.  And all have newer, hipper membership cards than me as well.  And even worse, the sixteen year old at the cash register was too young to realize that inferring my age wasn’t complimentary.  Oh well… life goes on, right?  🙂

Speaking of which, one of the things I bought there was an orange T-shirt that Mike said reminded him of the color of orange sherbet.  When I went to wash it before wearing it the first time and read the care label, it said “Wash in warm with like colors”.  I own absolutely nothing else even remotely that color.  What is it with all the care labels saying to wash with like colors?  I feel like that’s only actually practical if your whole wardrobe consists of only a couple of colors.

The registration for the SeaWheeze half marathon sponsored by Lululemon in Vancouver, BC, opened yesterday and sold out in an hour!  I got in though!  🙂  So Mike and I are headed to Vancouver in August for his birthday and for the race.  Mike and I are excited!  August will be such a great time to visit Vancouver… it should be nice and warm.  I also got us tickets for the Sunset Festival sponsored by the race that evening… local food, drinks, music, etc, in beautiful Stanley Park.  It should be lots of fun!

Work has been BUSY lately for both Mike and me (hence my less frequent blogging the past few weeks).  Mike and I have still been watching occasional Poirot episodes, though, and we’re keeping up with the new season of Downton Abbey.  Is anyone else watching the new season?  Thoughts??  It’s definitely a lot different than I thought it would be.  I figured with Sybil and Matthew gone the show would kind of peter out, but the writers seem to have done a great job of keeping a lot of the drama going.  The day Maggie Smith leaves the show, though, is the day I’ll probably lose a lot of my interest.  She’s wonderful!  🙂

It has been COLD!  I hate to complain, knowing how much the rest of the country has been suffering with cold and snow, but for Seattle these daytime high’s of 35 degrees are not cool.

It can snow in Seattle too! (This was actually last month, but we may be getting another half inch this weekend)

Piper has been extremely energetic lately.  Too energetic actually.  I think Mike and I are ready for a break from her tearing up and down the hallway mewing the whole way.  She is something else!  Fortunately, one thing that always quiets her down, particularly in this cold weather, is turning on the electric heater.

Piper wedged against the heater in the wall

Although it’s difficult to see in the above picture, the output for the electric heater is directly to her right and she’s enjoying the blast of hot air.  One of these days I think she’s going to burn her nose when she sticks her head too close.  I’m not sure she has any sense of self preservation at all.

Mike and I are definitely looking forward to the weekend (who cares that it’s only Tuesday and we still have three more days to go??).  We’re having a friend over this weekend, so that will be fun.  And tomorrow is the giant Seahawks homecoming parade.  Mike’s department is getting a green and blue cake to celebrate and are watching the parade on TV while eating it.  Since the parade starts less than a mile from my work building I’ll probably walk over during lunch and see part of it.  Unless it’s too cold.  Thirty-five degrees is pretty intimidating.  Plus I don’t have any Seahawks gear to wear.  I wonder if a plain old green scarf would do?

Have a wonderful week everyone!  🙂