A beautiful spring. :)

I realize it seems as though I’ve fallen off of the earth lately as far as this blog is concerned.  Truth to tell, it almost feels to me as though I’ve fallen off the face of the earth lately.  I’ve definitely been rushing from one thing to the next over the past few months.  Actually, it’s pretty much been since January.  Just to recap, in early January I started a new job.  In late January Mike and I put in an offer on a house.  About a thousand signatures later, we moved into our new home in late February.  The month of March was spent cleaning, unpacking, taking things to Goodwill, figuring out what the contractors still needed to work on in our house (i.e. the heater, the grout in the bathroom, one of the light fixtures, the refrigerator… etc).  The month of April was spent getting things for our new house in preparation for entertaining Mike’s parents and my brother who are coming to visit in May and June, respectively.  Also during the month of April and into early May, the yoga teacher training really amped up in intensity and I found many of my Friday nights and weekends filled which, although I seriously love the teacher training, ensured that my time to work on organizing the house was limited.  And somehow, after four and a half years in Seattle with a surprisingly small social life outside of work, we’ve actually been hanging out with friends more, which has also cut into blogging time.

However, I don’t want to lose touch with the blog.  It’s really my best way of keeping everyone back in the midwest aware of the fact that we’re still alive and life is still plugging along.  🙂  And now that things seem to be on their way to slowing down a little, I want to reconnect.

Piper looks like she needs to reconnect too…

So let’s see… where should I start?

This weekend Mike’s parents are coming, and we are getting excited!  We’ve been doing lots of cleaning and organizing to make sure that our house is in as good a state as we can get before they get here (although the basement still isn’t organized… we’ll have to work on that later this summer).  Then in June, my brother is coming for a visit, so I’m already making plans for things to do with him.  🙂

The yoga teacher training is nearing an end.  It really amped up in intensity during March and April, and now I only have one Friday night class left and our four-day yoga retreat at the end of June.  No more full weekend classes!  It’s been an awesome, crazy ride, and I’ve loved it, but I am ready to have a little more free time.  🙂

We have an afghan that my Mom and grandma and I made years and years ago over our new couch so that Piper doesn’t scratch it with her back claws.  However, the afghan is about a foot and a half too short.  My mom knitted up a bunch of squares for me, and now I’m in the process of sewing them together to add on to the afghan so that it’s long enough.  Mike, whose mechanical and electrical knowledge knows no bounds, finds it a little mysterious that yarn can be made into squares and those squares can be put together.  I remember once when Mike was at my parents’ house, my mom mentioned something about sewing a button on and Mike looked at her like she’d lost her mind.  Mike’s experience with losing buttons on a coat is that it means you either have to hold your coat shut or you have to buy a new coat.  So interesting how different peoples’ minds work.  🙂

And yet somehow all this stuff is easy…

 

Mike and I have been using our new grill pretty much every weekend.  We’re getting good at prepping the veggies for the grill, and Mike has a really good sauce to use with chopped-up grilled carrots made up of honey, balsamic vinegar, and some other stuff.  Very yummy!  🙂

 

Grill food!

 

Grill veggies!

I joined a run club at Mike’s and my gym and have been enjoying the weekly runs with a group.  It definitely motivates me to run faster!  Sometimes, probably too fast.  Last week I was trying to keep up with a guy who’s legs were probably twice as long as mine.  I don’t know why I thought I’d be able to do that.  🙂  I kept up with him for the first three miles, and then dropped back for the second three miles.  At least I’m out there pushing myself.  Our whole run club is going to run a 15k race together at the end of May sponsored by Brooks Running Shoes, so I’m excited about that!

Mike has been doing all of those housey kinds of projects that I knew he would love.  He’s been drilling holes everywhere, hanging up pictures, towel hooks, etc.  He’s also been putting felt feet on the bottom of all of our furniture and adjusting the heights of all of the desks so that they’re correct for hardwood floors now rather than carpeted floors.  He also built a bench to put inside the closet in the downstairs bedroom.  He has been carrying tools everywhere and has been making more trips to Home Depot than I can possibly count.  It’s becoming his new favorite thing to brows concrete cleaners and various types of screws at Home Depot.

I think someone forgot to tell Mike that we don’t have space in a townhome to do this…

Mike also got a drill to put up pictures, and he has been drilling holes everywhere he can find a place to drill a hole.  He is absolutely LOVING his new drill!

Last weekend was my first weekend without yoga teacher training in awhile, so Mike and I ran a bunch of errands on Saturday and pretty much relaxed on Sunday.

In other random news, is Seattle the only place I would see this?

A signal for a bike. Next to a one way street sign. Below a ‘straight only’ sign for cars. Confusion abounds!

 

In yet more random news, does anyone remember how I kept collecting all those Puffins cereal boxtops with the plan of adopting a Puffin?  When I started collecting boxtops (like six years ago.  I’m not kidding… it was actually six years ago) you needed 250 boxtops to “adopt” one puffin for a year.  However somewhere along the line, the number changed from 250 to 20.  What?!?  So I basically had enough to adopt eight Puffins!  I sent in a huge manilla envelope with all the boxtops rubberbanded in groups of 20 back late last year and kind of forgot about it.  And then literally the day that we were moving out of our apartment, my Puffins certificates came in the mail.  Close call to missing that!  (although maybe the Post Office would have forwarded it?)

One of my eight Puffins! (Well, ‘mine’ for a year anyway. I think after that I need more boxtops.)

 

I was all excited to read all about my Puffins.  Go to the Barbara’s Bakery website!   Read about puffins!  Buy Puffins cereal and collect boxtops to adopt your own puffin!  (Or just send me your boxtops and I’ll renew adoption on one of my puffins.)  😉  Mike already has one of his friends whose kids eat puffins cereal donating to my Puffins cause.  And I had an old friend at Amazon who ate Puffins and always brought me his boxtops too.

Mike and I discovered that the fire station in our neighborhood is the coolest one ever.  Check it out… they’ve got a statue of Piper on their roof!

Is that Piper up there? No, it’s 1000 times bigger than Piper.  But it’s walking off of a roof, which seems like the kind of thing Piper would think was a good idea.

 

Random fact of the day: Starbucks baristas will have NO idea how to spell Karena!  😉

Um… kind of sounds the same…

 

Random fact #2: I saw this old Volkswagen beetle and kind of fell in love with it.  Too bad it’s not for sale, right?  I mean, this is a cool car to drive around, right??

Too cute!

 

This Friday night Mike and I have some friends coming over to watch episodes of Planet Earth.  I’m not quite sure how that happened.  Especially since we only have a 40 inch TV.  I probably should have mentioned that to my friends before I invited them over to watch Planet Earth?  Oh well…

Anyway, I’ll try to be up here posting more regularly.  As far as everything in life, I’ve got a handle on the new job (not so new anymore… I’ve already been there five months!  How did that happen?), Mike’s work has been going well, yoga teacher training is nearing a close, grilling at our new townhome is awesome, Piper’s loving the sunshine and all the windows, we’ve been connecting with friends more regularly, and we feel very grateful that things are starting to slow down a little.

It’s important to take some time and smell the roses.  Or lounge in the sunshine.  🙂

Piper believes in setting a good example for Mike and me

Last minute details before our trip

Here we are at (t-1) days until our England trip!  We are excited, but Mike has been working really hard the past couple of weeks, so he is mostly crashing in the evening.  Because of that, I’ve done the planning for our trip so far, but we’re actually not doing a lot of planning beforehand.  We had a great time last year winging it in Italy, so that’s what we’d like to do for this trip as well.

I’ve been trying to get things done like cleaning Piper’s litterbox, setting out her food so it’s available for the cat sitter, getting all of our laundry done, etc, but this has been slightly hindered by Mike’s new obsession: Game of Thrones.  I started hearing lots of good things about this show about a year ago and it sounded like something Mike would like so I bought the first season and periodically bugged him to watch it (with no success).  However, since he was so busy at work last week and had very little energy left over to do anything I started bringing up him watching Game of Thrones again, this time with success.  Except I wasn’t planning on quite this much success.  We watched the first episode on Saturday, three more on Sunday, and then one or two every night since then.  The good news is that he loves the show, the bad news is that I really don’t have the attention span to watch (even a really good show) in a marathon manner.  In addition, the show is extremely intense and isn’t a relaxing show to watch.  Mike correctly pointed out, though, that this is really all my fault since there’s no way he would have started watching it without my influence.  We reached an agreement last night that I would watch some episodes with him and he could just briefly fill me in on the episodes he watched without me, at least until he’s recovered from the long hours at work and has energy to do things other than watch shows.

Apart from Game of Thrones and getting things ready to go, Mike and I haven’t been doing a lot.  We’ve both been busy at work trying to get work stuff wrapped up as much as possible as well.

One thing I finally got around to doing was enabling my iPhone for Europe.  It will be very expensive for me to talk on the phone in Europe, but at least I have the ability in case of emergencies.  The whole thing was more of an ordeal than I thought it would be.  I went to Verizon’s website and tried to set it up there, but I kept getting errors saying that my request couldn’t be completed and that I’d need to call Verizon.  So I called Verizon and after navigating through a complex (and pretty sophisticated) set of voice-recognition menu options I got to a point where I was told by the automated voice that my request needed to be handled by a Verizon representative and that I should remain on the line.  After a pause I was then informed (again by the automated voice) that Verizon was experiencing greater than normal call volumes and that I could stay on the line on hold but that I could get my problem solved much more quickly on the Verizon website.  Well, nope, apparently not since I already tried that.  I tried calling about five different times over the course of two days but just kept getting stuck on hold.  Finally Monday night I decided to do some Nintendo Wii Zumba while waiting on hold with Verizon.  I dialed the Verizon number and then put it on speakerphone so that I could hear when someone actually picked up.  I had just started dancing to an upbeat Latin song when I heard someone picked up.  Well that was a lot faster than the other times I’d called without doing Zumba!  I made a mental note to make sure I had the Nintendo Wii on the next time I wanted to reach Verizon.  The woman on the other end was extremely helpful although she did briefly throw me for a loop when she asked to speak to the primary account holder.

There was a pause during which I tried to come up with something to say and failed miserably.  Finally I settled for “It’s my account.”

“I understand that,” the woman said patiently as though she were used to talking to errant phone callers every day of her life.  “Would it be possible to speak to the primary account holder?”

It took a few back-and-forth iterations of “I am the primary account holder” and “I understand that.  Can I please speak to the primary account holder?” before we understood each other.  Verizon still had my maiden name in their system.  Once that was cleared up the rest of the conversation went very smoothly.  The weather was so gorgeous on Monday that Mike wanted to take some pictures from the roof of our apartment building and from across the street.  We got some good pictures on the roof, but then in a completely uncharacteristic move, Mike accidentally deleted all the pictures while he was trying to modify some configuration settings.  As I told Mike, that’s usually not something he does; it’s usually something I do and he makes fun of.  😉

We had a pretty relaxing weekend apart from prep for our England trip.  I’m really glad I bought us each a bunch of socks last weekend because the one thing you want to have enough of during trips is socks.  For us anyway.  🙂

The one thing I always hate is leaving Piper behind.  Poor girl!  She’s lying on my lap now and I would really like to move but I don’t have the heart to kick her off since I’m leaving her tomorrow.

Piper investigating the area under the bookshelf for mice

I know you’re all tired of seeing pictures of Piper, but the cute yorkie puppy at work wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to get a picture so you’re stuck with Piper.  After this trip, I should have a bunch of pictures to post that aren’t Piper-related!  (And hopefully work settles down for both Mike and me as well so that we have more time and energy for going places and doing things.)

Piper on the bed… last Piper pic for awhile!  And you can actually barely see her anyway since she’s so dark.

On Sunday night I made sloppy joes, and Mike’s been enjoying those each night since then.  Some things he just doesn’t get tired of and sloppy joes always seems to be one of them.  I need to figure out how to freeze the rest before we leave, but that will probably just be something I google tonight.  🙂

Before Mike discovered Game of Thrones but after he was too tired from work to do anything besides watch shows, we watched Rushmore, a Wes Anderson movie.  We had just watched the Grand Budapest Hotel a couple weeks earlier, so I guess we were in a Wes Anderson mood.  It was interesting and, given that it was one of his first movies, it was interesting to get a sense of the early Wes Anderson work vs his current work.  If you enjoy Wes Anderson movies you’ll probably enjoy Rushmore.  Otherwise you won’t.

I have been steadfastly sticking with running even though my pace is still slower than it was in the fall and I typically feel tired during my runs, particularly if I try to quicken my pace.  Tonight though I was on a treadmill in the workroom listening to trance (thank you Armin Van Buuren) and I felt like I was flying.  And most importantly, I felt strong.  Like half-marathon kind of strong (which is probably just as well since I’m registered for a half marathon this fall).  Sure, I was a little breathless and my legs were a little tired, but mostly I was just flying.  That’s a great feeling.  That makes all of the hard runs worth it.  And there have been plenty of those lately.  I did hill intervals late last week, and those were HARD.  Mostly because Seattle hills are intense.  I ran up a big hill and then down a slightly less big hill into Wallingford, through Wallingford, and then back around to the apartment building.  And that big hill was a half-mile steep hard hill.  Here’s a shot from that run:

A night run in Wallingford

I realize that the picture is not great, but it’s so much better than my old iphone.  With that if I tried to take a picture at night it just turned out completely black.  With this one you can see the mass of lights in the middle that is the lights of Seattle.  You can even see the Space Needle (the small bright light directly above the parked car just above the horizon).

I hope everyone has a wonderful week and a half… Mike and I will take a lot of pictures in England!  🙂

The luxury of new socks and spare vacuum cleaner batteries

I feel like I haven’t written a blog post in a long time.  Probably because it actually has been a long time.

Mike flew back to Michigan for a very quick trip last weekend for his Mom’s birthday and to help his parents move.  Even though it seems like that would make the weekend less busy for me, it actually felt much busier.  I used the time to do a lot of things that I normally don’t find the time to do.  For instance I drove to the outdoor University Village mall and stocked up on laundry detergent.  That was the only thing I bought at the grocery store there and I felt a little conspicuous buying four jugs of it.  But it was on sale, and I NEVER feel like carrying laundry detergent home from the store, so Saturday was laundry detergent day.  I used the self checkout, partially because it’s faster and partially because I felt a little ridiculous buying four jugs of laundry detergent and nothing else.  Of course Murphy’s Law took over and the machine I was using completely froze and I became the spectacle of the self-checkout lane.  Not a big deal by any means, but a little amusing in that ‘Murphy’s Law’ kind of way.

I also decided that it was the week for buying Socks.  I know that sock-purchasing probably sounds run-of-the-mill and not particularly eventful but this is only if you don’t have to struggle every morning to find a matching pair of socks without the beginnings of holes in it.  Or if you don’t have to make sure to do laundry at least every three days because you really don’t have more than three days worth of good socks.  (This problem has been getting worse over time since, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our washing machine and/or dryer seems to eat socks at a rate of about one or two socks a week.)  So basically I went sock-crazy.  I bought Mike a 10-pair pack of socks plus a 3-pair pack of socks in a different style.  I bought myself two 5-pair packs of socks.  It’s funny… this past week Mike has mentioned three times about how nice it is to just open his sock drawer and know that he has a bunch of pairs of socks in there.  It really is a wonderful feeling.  Definitely one of those small things that makes a huge difference.  🙂

Mike had a good trip to Michigan, but came home with a cold.  I think the cold weather and the stress of making a long trip over just a few days probably wore down his immune system, because he typically never gets sick.  Fortunately he kicked it pretty quickly, but he’s been sleeping more the past week to recover.

It occurred to me yesterday that nothing has happened in terms of the blog redesign I kept promising.  That is still on Mike’s and my todo list, but we had some snags.  First of all, work got really busy for both of us.  Even though I’m confident everyone reading this blog is tired of hearing that work is busy, it still puts a damper on getting other non-work things done.  The second problem is that Mike and I had a disagreement about the picture of me for the front page of the blog.  He wanted to use one and I didn’t like it.  That was about the sum total of the disagreement.  🙂  I know it sounds small, but we never really reached a resolution on that, so we stopped moving forward.  I’m hoping that spring will bring a new blog header… once our work settles down and we’ve gone to England.

Speaking of work, it is still busy but it’s no longer as hectic for me and it’s getting less hectic for Mike.  Definitely thankful for that.  I always like it when things fall out such that I’m spending more time at work in the winter and less in the summer.  All things being equal when it’s cold and rainy and dark anyway, why not be working?  And when it’s sunny and warm and the days are longer, why be working?  That’s pretty much my philosophy anyway, and strangely the past couple of years it’s worked out that way that my projects have been busiest during the winter.

Speaking of the England/Ireland trip, Mike and I are getting geared up to go!  I bought a new iPhone which will not only allow me to take MUCH better pictures, but will also allow me to actually talk on the phone in Europe (albeit pretty expensively).  But still.  Very good for emergencies.  My old iPhone is CDMA-only and can’t communicate on the European GSM networks.  Both Mike and I also got haircuts.  I’m not sure why, but we always do this a few weeks before going on vacation.  Maybe we want to make sure we look good in the pictures we take?  Or maybe we have a deeply-rooted fear that there won’t be hair salons at our destination?  Or maybe we know there will be hair salons but have deeply-rooted fears around what hair stylists in our destination local will do to our hair?  I’m really not sure.  🙂  That’s just one of those things we do before going on vacation.  I’ve also started to look up the weather in England and Ireland, and it is remarkably similar to the weather in Seattle.  So remarkably so, in fact, that it’s almost identical right down to the misty rain.  At least we won’t be in a strange climate!  🙂

Did anyone hear about the helicopter crash at the Seattle Center?  It was briefly on the front page of msn and yahoo.   Crazy!  A television helicopter was coming in to land on the landing pad on top of the Seattle center and missed.  How tragic!  And less than a mile from the building where I work!  Having said that, I was at work at the time of the crash and I didn’t hear anything at all.  There was a lot of smoke in the South Lake Union area though.

I was also surprised to hear about a huge mudslide over our main interstate, I-5, about 60 miles north of Seattle.  Wow!  It’s terrible, and it sounds like a lot of people are still missing.

I’ve been cooking a little lately.  I made Mike some banana bread and some beef stew.  It had been a long time since he’d had beef stew and since it’s been a little rainier lately, that seemed like a good time for beef stew.  I’ve also been using the Vitamix pretty regularly (although I don’t know that that counts as cooking!)  Mike and I had a friend over for dinner last night and I made a lemon chicken and potato recipe that both she and Mike really liked.  I’m glad it turned out so well!  I made some small modifications to the recipe.  For instance, it’s painful to grate lemon peel with a cheese grater (which is the only grating tool I have), so instead of 2Tbsp of fresh lemon juice and 2 of fresh lemon zest, I added 4Tbsp of lemon juice and barely one of lemon zest.  I also threw in a couple extra cloves of garlic because really when can you have too much garlic?  I also made a spinach strawberry salad, but I cheated on the dressing part and bought some raspberry dressing instead of making the dressing in the recipe.

As mentioned, one day last week I got my hair cut and highlighted, and Mike picked me up when it was over.  I fully appreciated that, particularly since it was raining.  I had just spent two hours at the hair salon, but Mike said, “So… do you want to be taken home or somewhere else?”

I was instantly suspicious.  And rightly so, since “somewhere else” turned out to be Lowe’s.

“Do we have to?” I asked.  “Can’t we go somewhere else?  Maybe even Home Depot?”

I should probably clarify here that Mike and I have an outstanding (semi) joke about Lowe’s.  I maintain that it’s the store most likely to bore people to death (namely, me), and that Home Depot runs it a close second in that category.  I can’t help it… there is absolutely nothing of interest to me there.  I can look at the shiny new stainless steel appliances for about two and a half minutes… but then I get bored.  Mike of course disagrees and thinks Lowe’s is a store with multiple interesting things in literally every aisle.

“No, Lowe’s,” Mike said, clearly in a good mood.

“What do you need from Lowe’s?” I asked, still hoping there was a chance to escape a Lowe’s trip by thinking of somewhere else to get whatever item Mike needed.

“A spare vacuum cleaner battery.”

He had me there… I had no idea where to get a vacuum cleaner battery.  “A what?  Our vacuum cleaner plugs in.”

“No, not that the big vacuum cleaner.  The small hand-held one.  I just got a promotion, and I want to celebrate by going to Lowe’s and getting a vacuum cleaner battery.”

(Mike did get promoted by the way… yay Mike!  He’s a senior engineer now!)

Of course there was no way that I could decline going to Lowe’s when it was a trip for his promotion, so off to Lowe’s we went.  I stopped in the ladies room on the way in and then came out and tried to locate Mike.  I walked up and down aisles and couldn’t find him anywhere.  I tried looking for vacuum cleaner batteries, but I didn’t know how to find those either.  I found vacuum cleaners pretty easily, but the little handheld one we had didn’t seem to be located with the other big, upright ones, so finding them didn’t help me find Mike.  After another couple of minutes of wandering, I saw a giant sign at the other end of the store that said “TOOL WORLD”.  I doubted vacuum cleaner batteries could be found there, but I was pretty sure Mike could.  Sure enough I found him browsing tools there.  On the way back home while driving through the misty Seattle rain Mike turned to grin at me.

“A promotion and a vacuum cleaner battery… life is good.”  I don’t get quite the delight out of vacuum cleaner batteries that Mike does, but I’m very proud of him for his promotion.

This is completely random and out-of-the-blue, but I can’t believe the new American Eagle line of clothing for dogs called American Beagle.  I’ve been pretty resilient about continuing to shop at American Eagle despite the fact that they’re marketing is geared towards people in a different decade of their lives than I am, but I don’t know if I can bounce back from this.  I should dress to match my dog?  Really??  I laugh every time I think about it.  🙂

I’ve been mixing my running between outdoors (on nice spring-like days) and on the treadmill.  A gym just moved in to the commercial retail space on the bottom floor of Mike’s and my apartment building, and I’m convinced that they have a deal with our apartment building to encourage everyone in the building to join the gym instead of using the apartment building’s fitness room.  For one thing, the workout room always seems to be out of paper cups.  The water cooler in the room really doesn’t benefit anyone if there aren’t any cups to drink the water from.  Then a couple of weeks ago (around the time when the new gym was starting to offer memberships) the television disappeared from the workout room.  It wasn’t actually replaced by anything, so there was just a bare spot on the wall where the TV had gone.  Strange!  Fortunately I almost never watched the TV anyway.  Also, given that many times one of the other residents had it turned on to a loud sports channel, I actually probably lucked out that it’s been removed.  🙂

My outdoor runs have been just gorgeous!

I-5 bridge over Lake Union

I guess I was in a bridge mood when I went on this run, because I also got a picture of a small walking bridge across Lake Union.

Walking bridge over part of Lake Union

Mike and I had a friend of ours over Saturday night so we got our apartment nice and clean prior to her arrival.  Mike has done a lot of work at our apartment making sure that there’s a place for everything (I think he learned this from the manufacturing environment he works in), so it’s actually very easy to clean our apartment now.  Or rather it’s pretty clean most of the time.  That makes it so easy to have people over because we can just spend an hour or two doing a deep-clean of the bathroom or something else relatively easy and isolated.

I hope everyone is having a good weekend!  Mike and I are trying to get geared up for another week at work!  And Piper, who had a busy day yesterday watching us clean and vacuum, has been sound asleep all day.  It’s definitely a tiring life for her!

Where can I find a petition against heavy metal doors?

Last weekend Mike and I actually spent quite a bit of time working.  It made this week much easier and more relaxing, so it was definitely worth it.  Mike got so wrapped up in his work, though, that it was difficult to get him extricated long enough to even eat or have a conversation or eat any food.  Crazy!  I get focused on work, but not that focused!  🙂  The good news was that because of that weekend, I got the first version of my software released and Mike got the modifications he wanted done to his software.  This past week has still been very busy getting everything cleaned up and released, but both Mike and I are starting to see the light at the end of our respective work tunnels.

The only bad thing about having kept my Michigan phone number for my cell is that when I get wrong numbers they typically occur based on the three-hour-time-difference Eastern Standard Time zone.  Practically what this means is that occasionally my phone rings at 5am because someone who is up bright and early in Michigan is making a business call and is awake enough to make the call but tired enough to get a couple digits wrong.  This happened to me Thursday morning at 5:09am.  I blearily looked towards my cheerily ringing phone but was in a sleep too deep to really fully awaken.  I stumbled up and reached for the phone but it stopped ringing just as I got to it.  I got a drink of water, trying to resolve the dream I’d been having to reality now that I was awake but without the mental capacity of a truly awake person.  I noticed that there was a voicemail on my phone from the call, so I listened to it.  A man who was way more perky than anyone should be in the morning was cheerfully apologizing to Cathy Phillips for not having gotten back with her sooner.  He followed up with “Please give me a call whenever it’s convenient for you.”  For a full half second I considered calling him back to at least let him know he had the wrong number and Cathy wasn’t going to get his message.  Only for half a second though.  He sounded so perky I really didn’t feel quite ready for that kind of intensity at 5:11am.

On Wednesday when I was coming home from work with two bags of groceries and a giant backpack housing two laptops.  (I seriously feel more like a pack mule than a person most days during my commute.)  I paused at the bottom door of the stairwell, balanced both bags of groceries in one hand, and braced myself to pull the huge (HEAVY!) metal door open.  I have to take a quick rabbit trail here to talk about these doors.  I have likely complained about these doors in the past because they are heavy to the point where it’s ridiculous.  Heavy to the point where I can do pushups for a full minute but my heart always sinks at the thought of yanking that three-inch think door open and keeping it open long enough to get myself and any bags I’m carrying through before it crashes shut with a resounding echo that can be heard for miles.  Or at least heard anywhere else in the hallway.  It also means that practically almost no one holds the door open for anyone else because, let’s face it, it’s hard enough to keep that giant behemoth open long enough to get yourself through, much less anyone else.  I suspect that the whole process of men opening doors for women happened during the middle ages when the doors of the aristocracy were not drastically different from the doors in my apartment (although probably made out of wood instead of metal!).  If all doors were as heavy as the stairwell doors I would definitely appreciate someone opening doors for me in a way that I really can’t fully appreciate with skinny little glass doors that are found everywhere else.  But anyway, I’m digressing pretty intensely.  I reached out to the pull the door open while bracing myself and my bags to accomplish the pull, and somehow my hand slipped on the big metal handle as I was pulling the door.  This resulted in the door crashing closed again before I’d gotten through it, but not before its metal handle had hit my hand pretty hard.  It was painful and my index finger swelled up instantly despite the cold water I soaked it in as soon as I got up to the apartment.  Over the next 7 days my finger turned various shades of red, green, and purple and has finally managed to heal now.  Seriously… is there a petition to ban doors above a certain weight and/or those with hinges so similar to jaws that you can barely get the door open long enough to get through before they snap on you?  And if so, where do I sign??

However, apart from my colorful index finger, things have been going well.  Mike and I decided to have at least a little more fun this weekend.  Friday night we went out to University Village.  It was raining and University Village is an outdoor mall, but we spent most of our time inside, so it was fine.  We stopped by the camera store so Mike could look at a new camera by Panasonic.  He was interested and spent some time taking pictures with it in the store to get a feel for it.  He’s very interested in its ability to operate in lower light with more noise reduction than his current camera.  After the camera store, we headed to the Apple store (can anyone guess where this is going yet?), and I bought a new silver iPhone 5S.  How exciting!!  I took pictures with it a lot yesterday, and the pictures are SO MUCH better than they were with my old iPhone 4.  So now I’m basically ready for our England trip.  🙂  It was also kind of a present to myself after all the time I’ve put into work the past couple of months.  Mike may be getting that camera as a present to himself after all of the work he’s been putting in as well… we’ll see.

Then we went to Boom Noodle and just had a relaxing dinner.  One bowl of vegetarian pho and one bowl of coconut curry later, and Mike and I were headed home in the rain.  We also went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel, the new Wes Anderson movie.  I think it gets released for all theaters next weekend, but it’s showing in select theaters this weekend.  One of the select theaters was the Guild 45th about a mile from our house, so we definitely wanted to go.  When we got there, we found out that there were only 50 seats left for the showing we wanted to see, and the later showing was completely sold out.  Apparently everyone else in Wallingford wanted to see the new Wes Anderson movie a week before it hit all theaters too.  Mike and I managed to find a couple of seats way in the back off to the left, but we were still able to see the screen perfectly.

Wes Anderson movies are always entertaining and visually stimulating.  You’re never able to predict what’s going to happen, either, since his plots take bizarre twists and turns, and I feel like subconciously that actually allows you to relax and enjoy the movie more.  Many times when I see movies I feel myself expending mental energy trying to figure out how the movie will end and what (usually predictable) twists and turns will occur in the process.  With Wes Anderson movies, you have no idea what will happen, so you just relax into your seat and enjoy the completely unexpected twists of the story.  In addition, Wes Anderson’s use of stylistic elements and vivid colors are gorgeous nuggets to be processed by your brain, making me feel like my brain is forming new neural pathways just to process the images I’m seeing.  Anyway, suffice it to say that Mike and I typically really enjoy Wes Anderson movies.  And The Grand Budapest Hotel was no exception.  There were a few actors in it I wasn’t expecting to see (like Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park), as well as lots of actors I’d never seen before.  The story was full of strange turns of events and, even though it was told with the typical Wes Anderson levity, it had a depth that had Mike and me awake at midnight that night discussing life and morality implications of some of the items dealt with in the movie.  I would definitely recommend it if you’re a Wes Anderson fan.  If you don’t like his other movies though, I would be shocked if you liked this one as it’s very true to his style.

Here’s a picture of Mike from the new iPhone camera… notice how clear it is and how natural the lighting looks!  LOVE it!  🙂

Mike at a camera store

If you’re wondering about the guy behind Mike with the purple hair, that is not a defect in my camera’s light sensor; his hair is actually that color.  This is a picture taken in Seattle.  Nonstandard hair colors are to be expected.  You’re just lucky there aren’t any unicycles in this picture given that Seattle seems to have a disproportionately large percentage of unicycles compared to other cities I’ve been in.  Maybe because the traffic on I-5 is so slow you have to find alternate methods of transportation?  I’m not sure.

I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend!  Mike and I have housework on the agenda today because we’ve let it go a couple of weeks in a row.  I’ve already cleaned Piper’s litterbox and done some cleaning in the kitchen and living room.  Next up is sorting through junk mail… lots of fun!  😉

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!  🙂

Remembering passwords and L-bracket reinforcement

This has been the week of the L-brackets.  And screws with black painted heads.  Mike has been at it with his projects!  He bought both a printer stand and a bookcase.  Neither one was expensive and Mike decided that neither was adequate in its purchased form.  This led to various ideas about reinforcing both so that they are sturdier.  This resulted in multiple trips to Home Depot and Stone Way Hardware to find the right reinforcing steel brackets to keep both structures rectangles rather than allowing them to turn into parallelagrams.  In all honesty, both the printer stand and the bookcase seemed sturdy enough to me.  Not like solid oak would be, but definitely sturdy enough so that they’d stay rectangluar-shaped for at least the next several years.  However, Mike was pretty set on the idea of reinforcing them.  He loves projects!  There’s nothing better than a bookcase that needs reinforcing in Mike’s world.  🙂

The Vitamix blender has been getting continued use.  I use it at least every other day for a smoothie of some sort, and sometimes Mike has one as well.  I made him a blackberry banana one recently that he really seemed to like.  I also made him a cantaloupe banana one that turned out much too watery.  Cantaloupe is delicious in smoothies, but you really need to have some other hearty stuff in the smoothie since the cantaloupe basically blends down into flavoured water.  And a banana just isn’t thick enough to provide the needed texture.  But at least I’m learning about the in’s and out’s of using the vitamix and getting the desired results from it.  🙂  I would post my recipes, but I actually haven’t been using any.  I’ve been winging it, daring smoothie-maker that I am.  🙂

I haven’t talked in much depth about running for awhile, primarily because I wasn’t running much during P90X.  However, I had chosen a half marathon to run this fall… a really fun one that takes place in Vancouver on Mike’s birthday, so it seemed like it would be a great opportunity to take a trip up there, run the race, and celebrate Mike’s birthday.  I proactively went to sign up for it last Monday at 10am when the website indicated that registration would be open.  Lo and behold, the site was operating extremely slowly and all the pages kept timing out so I wasn’t able to register.  Bummer!  Later that day the website said that due to a large amount of traffic, the website had gone down.  They assured all of the would-be participants that registration would be back up and running at noon on the following day.  I set myself an alarm so that I didn’t miss the registration, since it looks like the race is even more wildly popular than usual this year.  So at noon the following day I was in a meeting but kept hitting refresh on their site hoping that the ‘Register Now’ button appeared while I monitored the meeting.  Again, no dice.  Later in the day they posted a message on their website saying that actually registration wasn’t going to re-open until February 3rd because of technical problems.  I set myself another alarm, but given how popular the race apparently is this year I’ll have to wait and see whether I can get into it or not.  If not I’ll have to try to find another fun fall half marathon to run.  Periodically I keep thinking that I should run a full marathon again, but it’s so time consuming and breaks down your body (at least my body) so much, that I’ve resisted the urge so far.

On a completely unrelated note, I love some of The Body Shop products (i.e. lotion, shower gel, etc), but they have “super crazy lowest-price-ever blowout sales” literally all the time.  I don’t even think they let one sale expire before they start the next one.  And they always are really ridiculously good sales (i.e. buy any two items, get two free).  I don’t think anyone has actually ever paid full price for one of their items.  I’m honestly getting so tired of receiving “AMAZING SEMI-ANNUAL SALE” emails from them twice a day that I’m thinking of removing myself from their email list.  There are only so many block-capital email subjects I’m willing to view, and The Body Shop is taxing my patience, despite how much I like their products.  Why can’t they just lower the normal price of their products and then run fewer sales?  Apparently I don’t understand how marketing works.  🙂

So, for only the second time ever, the Seahawks are going to the Super Bowl!  I was pleasantly surprised.  I don’t follow football, so until they played San Francisco last weekend I didn’t realize how well they were doing and how close to the Super Bowl they were.  Not to jinx them or anything, but if they win this Super Bowl it will be the first one they’ve ever won.  Mike and I listened to the NFC championship game on TuneIn (a way to listen to radio stations on the internet).  We were multitasking and doing other things as we listened, but it was still a very interesting game.  San Francisco was up by 10 points in the first quarter leading me to believe Seattle would lose.  And then there was the time that Seattle was at the San Francisco 1 yard line (less than a yard to goal, actually), and then lost the ball.  Craziness!  But ultimately they ended up winning and are (hopefully) ready to take on Denver!

I have run into an interesting phenomenon lately regarding passwords.  I have accounts on such a variety of sites that I’m constantly finding myself at the login page for a given site trying to remember my password.  Three times this week I tried a couple of passwords unsuccessfully and ended up clicking on the ‘Lost my Password’ button.  When I was allowed to reset my password I sat back for a minute trying to decide on a password.  And all three times when I decided on a password and tried to enter it the site told me it was an invalid password “because I wasn’t allowed to use my current password”.  How interesting!  What does that say about my psychology that I am unable to come up with my password when presented with the login screen, but if given the opportunity to create a new password I invariably try to use the correct password?  That is fascinating to me.  There are some neural pathways in my brain that don’t appear to be connected.  Somehow I have to figure out how to connect the “create a new password” and “remember my old password” mental pathways.  Or I just have to mentally create a new password and try entering that in the password field.  😉

Work has been busy for both Mike and me lately, so by the time we reached this weekend we definitely felt overdue for it.  It’s gone by too quickly, as usual, but at least we’ve gotten more sleep than usual this weekend, which always makes the days go by more easily.

This evening Mike and I didn’t make it to church because of some overzealous cleaning that went longer than expected.  However, we listened to a sermon online from a Sunday that we missed at the beginning of the year.  It was a very thought-provoking message, and focused on stepping outside of your comfort zone to really be transformed in Christ.  It was really interesting and definitely gives us some things to think about headed into this new year (although at almost a month into 2014, we’re arguably much more than just “headed into” the year).

The over-zealous cleaning led to vacuuming which led to a very unhappy Piper, particularly since we took away her fountain for cleaning in addition to bringing out the vacuum cleaner.  I don’t remember if I mentioned this in a previous blog post, but Mike and I bought Piper a little fountain.  The purpose behind this is to get her to drink more water, since apparently cats are more drawn towards drinking moving water rather than still water.  Her drinking more water translates to her having healthier kidneys which translates to fewer UTI’s and trips to the vet, so we are all for that.  The fountain is surprisingly small.  It took some time for Mike and me to get used to it, because since it’s running constantly we kept hearing the water and thinking the faucet was dripping.  Now, however, we’re nearly completely used to it, and Piper just loves it.  It is now part of her morning ritual to sit about a foot away from the fountain and stare at it intently for about forty minutes.  She is fascinated by the running water.  We’ve also seen her drinking from it multiple times, so it seems to be accomplishing its purpose.  It does need to be cleaned periodically, though, and Piper hates it when the fountain is unplugged and taken away.  It has definitely become one of her favorite items in the house.

One thing I haven’t talked about recently is cooking.  This is mostly because while doing P90X I did very little cooking because it took up so much time.  Now, however, I’m starting to get back into it.  Today I made Cornbread Beef Skillet for Mike.  It was ok.  It really lacked any form of seasoning, so I replaced the tomato paste with some tomato basil spaghetti sauce (and ended up using more like a cup of it instead of the 1/4 cup of tomato paste).  I also added minced garlic and Italian seasoning and used them pretty liberally.  However, I still noticed Mike adding salt to the meal, so apparently it still needed some more seasoning.  I think it’s a promising recipe, but needs a little zing.  Not too much zing, since Mike’s not a big zing fan.  But at least a little zing.  🙂  Tomorrow I’m planning on making a red lentil soup.  Hopefully that turns out really well!

There was a stale air advisory here last week.  I’m not entirely sure what causes that, but I think it has to do with air getting trapped in Seattle because of the mountain ranges on all sides, and then the air gets stale and pollution can build up and things like that.  Definitely by the end of the week both Mike and I felt like the air we were breathing outside had an unhealthy amount of car exhaust in it.  Now, though, that passed and we’re back to our usual windy, fresh-aired Seattle.

There was an open house going on at a new set of townhomes a few blocks from our apartment today, so Mike and I went over to look at them.  They are GORGEOUS!!  And when I say gorgeous… I seriously mean gorgeous.  Solid wood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of the Seattle skyline and the Space Needle from the windows, SKYLIGHTS, lovely floor plans, walk-in closets in the master bedrooms, a WALK-IN SHOWER in the bathroom.  Etc.  Etc.  Etc.  Seriously breathtaking.  However, Mike and I just signed another year lease with our apartment and, quite frankly, thinking about how many times our annual salaries those townhomes were was off-putting.  😉

Tonight is for relaxing, reassuring Piper that all’s right in the world now that the vacuum cleaner has gone and the fountain is back, and probably a Poirot episode.  Clearly we are wild and exciting people.  🙂  I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend (and I hope you are all staying warm… particularly those of you in the recently refrozen midwest!).

COLD weather and Piper’s latest adventures

Life has been very busy at work lately for both Mike and me.  I don’t talk about our jobs often on the blog since no one wants to hear details about other people’s jobs (unless they do something interesting like photograph for National Geographic), but it has definitely been busy for both Mike and me.  However, despite (or perhaps because of?) the busyness of life, time continues to march forward.  Mike and I are only three weeks from the end of P90X.  Crazy!  I can’t believe how relatively quickly it’s gone by.

So, let’s talk about results.  The bottom line: are we seeing any?  YES.  We are.  I’m definitely much stronger than I used to be.  I think when I go back to running after I’ve finished with P90X my legs will be much stronger and healthier for running.  My upper body is also much stronger and I can do several unaided pull-ups.  I can visibly see the difference a little bit, but I can definitely feel it in how heavy things feel to me when I pick them up or carry them.  Mike is seeing great results.  He’s losing weight around his stomach and he’s also making significant muscle gain in his upper body.  He doesn’t see the changes in himself as clearly as I can and wishes his progress was better, but I definitely see the difference.  And so, apparently, does his boss who didn’t know Mike had been working out but joked last week that he should have Mike tested for steroid use.  🙂  Mike also has so much more stamina and energy in the evenings than he used to.  I have also noticed that, despite his drinking coffee regularly again, he hasn’t been getting any of his bad headaches, which is awesome!  So all in all, we’re very happy with the results.  We’re at the point now with only three weeks left where we’re considering what we want to do fitness-wise when we’re finished with P90X.  I definitely want to get back to running regularly again and do yoga more than once a week.  Mike is still deciding exactly what he wants to do, but it may include a scaled-down version of P90X (i.e. maybe 4-5 days a week instead of 6 or something).  So anyway, good things have been happening on the fitness front.  🙂

Along the theme of time marching forward, Mike and I are celebrating our 1 year anniversary in less than a week.  How did the past year go by so quickly??  We both took the day off of work so that we can just relax, but we don’t have any definite plans.

Piper has been bouncing off the walls lately.  I have no idea why.  Is there some cyclical thing I should know about cats but don’t?  Do cats just go nuts in December?  Last night Mike and I did yoga, and the yoga DVD had only been on for a couple of minutes before Piper brought her stick-mouse toy and laid it on Mike’s foot.  This is Piper code for “make this stick mouse move so I can chase it”.  Mike told her to wait and moved the stick mouse.  One minute later she brought it back and set it on his foot again.  He threw it to the other end of the room and told her again to wait.  She meowed at him and then picked up the stick mouse and laid it on my foot.  She did this repeatedly for most of the hour-long workout.  When she wasn’t trying to get us to play with her she was tearing from the front door down the hall to the living room, and then jumping up on the red chair, from the chair to her kitty condo, and from her kitty condo to the top of the (very tall) bookcase.  Then she would jump down and repeat the entire process, mewing the entire time.  Mike and I both played with her last night, but she just seemed to have an overflowing fountain of energy.  I have to keep reminding myself that this cat is 10 years old, because she certainly doesn’t act like it!  I’m wondering if maybe now that she’s been off of the antibiotics for about a week, she just feels really well and frisky.  Who knows?  I certainly have no idea!

As part of Piper’s energetic state she has been exploring things she normally sleeps rather than exploring.  For instance, she discovered yesterday that she can paw at the sliding door to our bedroom until it opens.  Given that she has peed on the bed no less than three times in the past year, this wasn’t something Mike and I ever wanted her to learn.  However, she did.  I blocked the right sliding door, but then she moved on to the left one right away.  Mike and I realized we were going to have to find some “lock” for sliding doors.  We went to the local hardware store and looked at childproof locks but they were geared more towards appliances and cabinets than towards sliding doors.  So currently we have two handweights set on either side of the sliding doors which Piper isn’t strong enough to move by herself.  Mike’s engineering mind is spinning on a solution though, so I suspect we’ll have something better in place before long.

Yesterday Mike and I went downtown to do a little shopping.  We enjoyed seeing all of the Christmas lights and all of the people.  Despite the cold weather, there were SO MANY people downtown Christmas shopping!  It’s always so much fun being downtown this time of year with all of the lights.  Having a car is really nice when it’s this cold though.  We basically drive from our parking ramp to the mall’s parking ramp and don’t have to actually set foot outside.  🙂  Inside the mall there was a choir of girls performing Christmas songs.  So festive!  When Mike and I were done shopping we stopped at the (surprisingly uncrowded) Nordstrom Cafe.

The Nordstrom Cafe.. great atmosphere and great food!

I don’t think it occurred to any of the holiday shoppers to go up to the fourth floor of Nordstrom looking for food.  Mike and I have been to the cafe before, though, and the food is delicious!  Mike opted for roasted chicken and vegetables and I got split pea soup.  Then we spent a little (very little because of the cold) time wandering around outside looking at the lights.

Mike by the Macy’s star

The weather here has been COLD!  I’m speaking relatively here, since I heard it hit -2 degrees in Portland a couple days ago which is extremely cold and nearly unheard of for them.  On Friday I was telling a co-worker that I was going to have to move to Vegas for some warmer weather when my best friend who lives in Vegas texted me that it was in the mid-30’s there.  Wow!  Yesterday the high was 26 degrees and it got down in the teens overnight.  Although that is nothing compared to what most of the country is experiencing, it is cold for us Seattlites.  To make things worse, last weekend the temperature dropped 10 degrees and it has gotten a few degrees colder every day since then so that it’s now reached its current state.  Last night we actually had a severe cold weather alert and had the coldest night we’ve had in Seattle since November 2010.  Walking to the bus stop each day last week was like an exercise for the mind and the body.  Each day I walked out the door knowing it was slightly colder than the day before and slightly warmer than it was going to be the following day.  I felt chilled to the bone continuously and by the time I finally reached Friday, I wanted to explore working from home forever (or at least for the rest of the winter) so that I could get away from the progressively colder and colder Seattle weather.  I was also considering moving to Cabo (I have never been to Cabo, never thought about Cabo and generally had no interest in Cabo, but one of my coworkers told me it was always warm there and they were definitely not experiencing any kind of cold weather.  Sold!)  Suffice it to say, it was a rough week weather-wise.  The crazy thing, though, is that with all of this ‘temperatures-in-the-20s’ Seattle weather, we have not actually gotten any snow (or sleet or freezing rain or any other form of precipitation).  It has been extremely dry.  Which I would normally be thankful for, except that if it actually snowed the buses would grind to a halt and I would be forced to work from home away from the frozen streets of Seattle.  So how is Mike handling this cold weather?  Much better than me.  🙂  However, he has commented multiple times in a surprised tone, “Wow… it is COLD!”.  Happily, by Wednesday the weather in Seattle is supposed to be back up in the mid-40’s.  Not exactly Cabo weather, but enough to feel like a heat wave based on our current temperatures.  🙂

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend!  I’m ready for a warmer week this week!  🙂

A spider sighting after three years

The rain has started in Seattle!  In the ten-day forecast, there aren’t any days with a chance of rain less than 30%.  Also, since we just went off Daylight Savings Time over the weekend it’s crazy how dark it is!  Basically it starts to get dark at 4pm and by 5pm it’s just like night outside.  So strange!  It’s definitely putting me in a holiday frame of mind, though, since there have been all kinds of little cherry-picker machines across South Lake Union stringing lights on buildings and trees.  Everything looks so festive!  Probably prompted by this, I’m deciding what Mike and I should do about Thanksgiving.  I’m leaning towards getting a holiday meal from PCC grocery store, since it’s all organic and locally owned and since we’ve done Whole Foods the past three years and I think we’re ready for a change.

Along the PCC lines, although the election was on Tuesday ballots are still being counted so we don’t know whether the GMO labeling bill passed or not.  Right now they’re trailing 46% to 54%, though, so it’s looking like it probably won’t pass unless there are still a lot of uncounted ballots and all of the procrastinators are pro-GMO labeling.  I’m disappointed.

It’s so hard to believe we’re already into November and we’re looking towards the holiday season again!  Crazy!  This time last year Mike and I were busily getting stuff together to get married (we’ve been married almost a year already… crazy or what?  That sure went fast!).  Because of all of that, I didn’t even send out Christmas cards.  I’d like to send them out this year, but I should really get started on that soon.  I also calculated that Mike and I will finish the P90X 90-day workout plan on December 28.  Not exactly ideal.  It means that we’ll be doing P90X through the holidays (both Thanksgiving and Christmas) and when we hit the New Year which is when people traditionally start new fitness programs, we’ll be finishing up.  Oh well.  Mike and I have always marched to the tune of a slightly different drummer.  🙂  Mike is definitely getting in great shape due to P90X!  I can totally tell a difference in his physique.  He has slimmed down and gotten more muscular.  But he claims he can’t see a difference.  I wish I would have taken all his measurements before we started so that I could prove to him that there is a difference.  I honestly don’t see a huge difference in my physique, though.  My arms and shoulders are a little more toned, but nothing crazy.  I’m really starting to love the workouts though… they’re so balanced!  Chest and back one day.  Plyometric jump training the next day.  Arms and shoulders the next day.  Yoga the day after that.  Etc.  Plus it’s so much fun to have Mike as my workout buddy.  🙂

Because of the P90X program, Mike and I were ready for some heavier weights, so on Saturday we drove to South Center mall looking for a ‘Fitness Outlet’ store that was supposed to be over there.  We drove around for half an hour while Mike shook his head over my navigational abilities and I shook my head over the new native Apple maps app.  Eventually, though, we discovered that the app was directing me to the right place and I was directing Mike to the right place.  The Fitness Outlet had closed and been replaced by another store.  Well that explained a lot.  Sorry for my harsh words, Apple maps!  Because of our failure to go to Fitness Outlet, we ended up going to a brand new Dick’s Sporting Goods that just opened in Issaquah (about 15 miles east of Seattle).  We hadn’t been out to Issaquah before, but it was fun to get there!  We drove through tall mountains and hills and it felt like we were much farther from the city than we actually were.  At Dick’s we found exactly what we were looking for: heavier dumbells and a new resistance band.  On our way back, the sky looked stormy, but somehow it was partly sunny.  This resulted in a gorgeous rainbow (the full justice of which is not shown in this picture).

A rainbow!

It even appeared to end approximately over our apartment.  How nice.  🙂  And as we got off the freeway, it looked even more gorgeous with the dark clouds behind it.

The rainbow amid storm clouds

One day this week Mike told me had had a nightmare the night before.  I was instantly sympathetic.

“Oh no!  What happened?”

“I accidentally put regular gas in our car instead of premium.”

I waited.  “And?”

“And nothing.  That was the nightmare.  I was really glad to wake up.”

“You had a nightmare about putting the wrong kind of gas in our car?  Nothing about guys with guns or knives or anything?  How is that even categorized as a nightmare??”

“Because it was disconcerting.  How was I going to get all of that incorrect gas out of the car?  I could siphon most of it, but then what?  How would I get the residue out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither.  That’s why I’m glad I woke up before I had to figure it out.”

So, there you have it.  Mike’s deepest, darkest fear: putting regular unleaded into a car that takes premium.  Although Mike didn’t specifically say it, I suspect a secondary aspect to his nightmare was the unleaded probably didn’t even come from a Shell station.

Yesterday I was emptying the trash in the bathroom and noticed that one of Mike’s pairs of jeans was wedged tightly inside a small red bucket that we keep around for washing the floors.  I had absolutely no explanation for why those jeans would be inside the bucket, so I went to find Mike.

“Mike, why is this pair of jeans in the bucket?”

“Oh.  Yeah.  I was going to give those to Goodwill.”

I waited, but Mike didn’t seem to have any other forthcoming information.

“And?  How did they end up in the bucket?”

“Well, I didn’t want to put them in the new dresser and I didn’t really have a place for them.  So…” Mike shrugged.

“So you wedged them in a cleaning bucket in the bathroom?”

“Yeah.”

“Because there was no better place for them?”

“Yeah.”

I will never fully understand the male mind.

Piper is fully recovered from her UTI but is still on antibiotics to make sure it’s fully eradicated.  She and I have developed a system now for her taking the pill.  I hold her chin up, pop her mouth open and pop the pill in.  Piper reciprocates by staying mostly still and only doing a minimal amount of mewing.  The pill is always instantly followed by her food, so she knows that if she cooperates quickly she can get her food quickly.  It’s a pretty good system.  It now only takes me about 10 seconds to give her a pill.  It used to take a couple of minutes, for reference.  There was one instance where I found her antibiotic pill on the floor after I gave it to her, and I had to give it to her again.  She has discovered that if she can trap the pill between her gum and her lip long enough for me to walk away she can spit it out.  Tricky, tricky cat!  She’s continuing to love our new red chair though.

Piper, why is your head upside down??

This past weekend I made more beef stew.  I still had parsnips, potatoes, and carrots to use up.  I still do, actually, but now I have fewer to use up.  🙂  Speaking of which: I picked my 20th and last load of CSA produce on Tuesday!  Miraculously I picked up produce on 20 consecutive Tuesdays without getting rained on!  The odds of that happening in Seattle are probably astronomically low, but I somehow managed it.  I was pleasantly surprised to get more winter squash, a few potatoes, a bunch of radishes, and some russian kale and arugula this week.  I was less excited to see that there were three leeks and two bulbs of fennel.  I barely know what to do with one leek, much less three.  Ditto with the fennel, but fennel is even worse because it goes with so few things due to its anise/licorice flavor.  I’ll definitely be delving through some recipe books this weekend!

In other news, I killed a SPIDER in the kitchen this morning!  I only had a small light on so I wouldn’t wake Mike before his alarm went off, and I saw a dark smudge on the kitchen counter.  Despite three years of no spiders, I was instantly suspicious and on my guard.  I leaned in a little closer.  AAAAHHH!  It was a spider.  The first one in my apartment in three years.  I knew if I hesitated for a moment I would become too paralyzed by fear to do anything and I’d have to wake Mike up so I reacted quickly.  I grabbed a folded up paper towel sitting on the counter and attacked.  My attack was swift and deadly.  My aim was perfect.  Unfortunately my shock wore off almost instantly, I recovered my fear, and promptly dropped the paper towel with the squished spider in it on the floor.  Yuck.  My next step (after disposing of the spider’s remains) was to go close the window since I’m sure that’s how he got in.  There are many advantages to having picturesque trees outside of your apartment, but repelling insects and arachnids isn’t one of them.  I didn’t have these kinds of problems in South Lake Union, the land of perpetual cement mixers and almost no living things except rats.

This morning I got a call from my eye doctor’s office in Michigan.  It was a recording, and it informed me in a very tinny female voice that I was due for an eye appointment sometime after November 1.  Then there was a pause.  And then the entire recorded message repeated again from the beginning.  Between the fact that I haven’t even lived in Michigan in three years and the fact that their recorded reminder repeated itself in the same phone call, I think there’s something buggy going on in their software.  Clearly some quality engineers are needed!

How is everyone else’s week going?  I can’t believe we’ve almost reached the weekend already… the weeks have just been flying by!

I’ll leave you all with a picture of two adorable co-workers: Baxter and Maggie Moose.

Baxter and Maggie Moose… what cuties!!

Piper and the lions

It has gotten very chilly here in Seattle!  Our temperatures were in the 70’s and very suddenly they dropped down to the low 50’s during the day and the 40’s at night.  It has definitely been cold!

Fortunately this weekend the weather warmed up considerably.  It was great timing because I really needed to clear out all of the old, dead plants from my garden and get my winter crop planted.  My friend from work who gave me seeds this spring for my garden gave me more seeds this fall.  If this keeps up, I may never need to buy my own seeds and might be fine just using his overflow seeds.  It took me about half an hour to clear out all the old plants, but I kept the lacinato and curly kale because they were actually still alive and growing.  Our rosemary tree is flourishing like crazy.  It’s a little out-of-control actually.  I pruned it back, and now whenever I open our refrigerator door I’m greeted by a strong rush of rosemary scent.  I love it!  🙂

Mike and I started our 90-day P90X workout plan Monday.  It’s strange.  I’m used to working out regularly, but I was still expecting to be suffering because P90X is supposed to be SO extreme.  Mike was expecting to suffer just because he hasn’t worked out regularly in awhile.  So, what were our first impressions?

So, let’s start with the first DVD – Chest and Back.  It was hard.  Very hard.  But not hard in a doable way.  Hard in a ‘I can’t possibly do pushups and pullups for fifty minutes’ kind of hard.  In a way, this was probably discouraging.  Typically when I do a hard workout I feel a sense of accomplishment at the end.  I didn’t feel that after this workout, because I wasn’t able to accomplish most of the exercises without a lot of help.  Mike and I made it all the way to the end of the workout, but we were using a chair to assist us in the pullups and we were on our knees during most of the pushups after the first couple of sets.  Also, there were lots of water breaks during the workout, so it definitely didn’t get my heart rate up.  Since I’m used to interval training and a lot of cardio, I didn’t even break a sweat during the workout.  Mike did, but it was still kind of unsatisfying since we were doing modified versions of the exercises so often.  Bottom line: Mike and I were sore the day after, but not as sore as I would have expected after a P90X workout.  However, that was just the first DVD.

The second workout was plyometrics (i.e. interval/jump training).  This was right up my alley after all the Jillian Michaels workouts I’ve been doing this summer, so it was extremely doable for me.  Mike agreed that it was much easier than the first one.

Our third workout was arms and shoulders which, again, we both agreed was extremely doable.  (Granted we were using weights a lot lighter than the 35lbs the lead trainer was lifting!).

Day four was yoga, which was amazing for Mike!  His back and neck have been noticeably less tense and he’s been less headachy ever since  the yoga workout.  I think Mike is a fan of yoga now!  Day five was legs and back.  Again, challenging but not undoable.  We had a lot of pullups in this workout as well, but I think we’re getting more acclimated to doing the assisted versions of them so that’s going well.  Day 6 was kickboxing which was just FUN!  Throwing punches, kicks, uppercuts… lots of old-school boxing moves.  We got one day off, and tomorrow we repeat the whole series again next week.  One week down, 12 to go.  (When I put it in that perspective, it seems like we have SO far to go!).

Unfortunately for the past week and a half I have not been motivated to cook.  At all.  Pretty much ever since I made the eggplant stew that neither Mike nor I liked.  I don’t know whether it was just really demotivating to make something that neither Mike nor I cared for, or if I’m just running out of steam because of all of the CSA veggies I keep getting.  🙂  Because of that, I reluctantly bought some beef to make up into a stir-fry last weekend, but didn’t actually make a stir fry.  Then Tuesday night at 8:30pm after the P90X workout, I got mysteriously motivated (probably by the fact that I had just picked up ANOTHER CSA load and knew I had to start using the veggies I already had) and made mongolian beef.  It smelled really good!  Just like stir fry should.  Mike liked it, but really he enjoys stews and potpies the most.  I also got motivated enough to chop up two heads of cauliflower and made cauliflower soup this morning from this book of veggie soups.  The book has some editing issues in it.  For instance in the cauliflower soup recipe one of the steps listed adding the cilantro, but the list of ingredients didn’t contain cilantro anywhere in it.  I still don’t know whether it was supposed to have cilantro, but I didn’t add any.  However, for three dollars, it has a lot of great, easy vegetable soups so I’m willing to overlook cilantro ambiguity.

Mike got the Wii up and running again now that we have a TV so I have been doing a lot of Wii Fit (basically exercise disguised as a video game).  I also bought a zumba game for the Wii, so I’ve been doing that too (basically exercise combined with dance disguised as a video game).  Mike has already commented on how much better my dancing is getting as a result of that zumba game, so apparently I’m making progress.  🙂  Piper loves hanging out with me while I play the Wii.  She finds a sunny spot and chills while she watches me.

Piper in the sun watching Wii Zumba

It has been incredibly rainy lately.  Rainy to the point that there was actually a tornado touchdown south of Seattle in Tacoma last week.  Tornados in Seattle is a new one for me!  One of my friends at work said we rarely get tornados here because the mountains break up the wind.  Or something.  I didn’t quite understand what he was getting at.

TWO corgis came into the office one day last week!  Baxter and one of his friends Maggie Moose.  (Yes, her name is actually Maggie Moose.)  I mastered the art of synchronized treat throws so that they each caught their own treat in midair at the same time, thus ensuring that they didn’t get into a fight over the treats.  (With corgis, friendship is one thing, but treats trumps friendship every time.)  There was a LOT of cuteness going on with those two!  🙂

Baxter and Maggie Moose. Yes, Maggie Moose is wearing an off-kilter shark costume. Long story.

I have also started looking up info for Mike’s and my trip to the British Isles this next spring.  This will be a little more complicated since we can’t just take a train the way we did in Italy.  (Surprisingly there are no train tracks across the Irish Sea.  Weird.  The British government should get right on that.)  So we’ll have to figure out what mixture of trains, planes, and automobiles we want for our transportation once we’re there.  (Actually buses, subways, and potentially bicycles should also be present in that list.)  I’m also starting to talk to Mike and get a list together of things we want to see while we’re there.  It’s already a lot easier to plan this trip than the Italy one because all of the websites are in English.

Mike and I bought the set of Planet Earth DVDs this weekend.  I seriously think that was the primary reason we bought the TV… to be able to watch Planet Earth and other nature shows.  Well, that and being able to use the Wii.  😉  We watched the Great Plains episode last night and Piper, who had been asleep on the back of the couch when we first started watching, woke up and stared at the screen with giant yellow eyes when she heard the animal noises.  The lions were her particular favorite (maybe she could recognize their sounds as being similar to hers?).  She watched with so much interest… she loved it!  It was fun for Mike and me to see her reaction and to feel like she was “watching” the show with us.  I think we’ll watch the Jungle episode tonight and see if she has the same response watching jaguars as she did watching lions.  🙂

With the cold weather lately, Piper has been loving our knitted afghan.  🙂

Piper on the afghan

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend!  🙂

What is the plural of ‘eggplant’?

I just picked up the CSA produce last night and was shocked to find not one but TWO big eggplant (eggplant?  eggplants?  I have no idea what the plural for eggplant is).  So far when I get eggplant, I’ve been making ratatouille which is an amazingly forgiving dish.  I’ve made it with no peppers, one eggplant, and pounds of zucchini.  I’ve also made it with no eggplant, one green pepper, and pounds of zucchini.  I think I have discovered why ratatouille is apparently ubiquitous in the French countryside… if you have a bunch of summer squash, zucchini, and peppers, what else are you going to do with it besides throw it all together into a stew?  I mean, really?  Besides eggplant parmesean and ratatouille I don’t even actually know any dishes people use eggplant in.  Am I missing something crucial?  Is eggplant actually used in a lot of things of which I am unaware?  Plus, how many other main course dishes are so flexible that you can completely eliminate key ingredients (i.e. eggplant and peppers) and they still taste about the same?  Either that of the sheer volume of zucchini I’m using just overwhelms everything else.  TWO big eggplant is something else though.  Unless I want to make ratatouille that basically consists of eggplant I need to find something to do with that second eggplant.  I asked Mike how he feels about eggplant parmesean.

“It’s ok,” he said.  “How do you feel about Audio Engine speakers?”

Talk about answering a question with a question.  And a pretty unanswerable question at that since my knowledge of Audio Engine speakers (or any speakers for that matter) is pretty small.

“Um, they’re fine.  Are you going to like them well enough that we don’t have to package them back up and return them?”  I was referring to the incident last week in which my audiophile husband bought fairly nice speakers for our TV and packaged them up the day after they arrived and shipped them back.  He told me that “they sounded like a tinny iPhone in his right ear and booming bass in his left ear”.  He told the company he bought them from that the “product was different than expected”.  I appreciated that he had enough tact not to put his full thoughts on the RMA for returning the speakers.  😉

“Probably.”

“Well, they sound good then.”

On Sunday a line of thunderstorms rolled through Seattle.  It was shocking really.  We so rarely get any thunderstorms.  Piper, who has basically forgotten what thunder is, dove under the bed for safety as soon as she heard a reasonably loud crack.  As for Mike and me, we were glad we hadn’t made any outdoor plans for Sunday.  Or much of any plans at all for that matter.  Well, we did go to Staples and wander around, but I don’t know if that counts as “plans”.

Fun at Staples

In the spirit of fall, I made Mike meatloaf for dinner on Sunday night, along with a small baked red potato (courtesy of the CSA) and some lemon pepper sauteed zucchini (also courtesy of the CSA).  Now that we’re heading into fall, I’m getting more root vegetables from the CSA which is nice because those usually store better than the spring/summer vegetables.  Potatoes, for instance, stay good for several weeks as long as they’re in a cool environment.  That’s definitely not true of zucchini which starts getting slimy after a few days to a week!

I asked Mike what he wanted me to make for dinner tonight and he said beef stew.

“But I just made beef stew a week ago.  Aren’t you tired of beef stew?”

“No.  Just use different root vegetables than last time.”

“You mean I shouldn’t use potatoes?”

“No, no.  Use potatoes.”

“You mean without carrots then?”

“No.  Use carrots.”

“Well, what do you want me to change then?”

“Didn’t you put in turnips last time?”

“Yes.”

“Put something different in instead of the turnips this time.”

Ah.

So there is slow cooker beef stew simmering at home as I write that is exactly the same as usual except that the turnips from last week are replaced by parsnips this week.  Hopefully that’s enough of a change.  🙂

Also, in case anyone is interested, parsnips look very much like huge white carrots and are very difficult to cut.  Particularly with a three-inch paring knife which seems to be my cutting and chopping tool of choice in the kitchen (inexplicably, given the fact that we have a nice knife specifically for cutting veggies).  My only exposure to parsnips was in a cooking class that Mike and I took together for our anniversary five years ago.  I don’t recall what we did with the parsnips in the class; I just remember that their existence registered in my mind for the first time at that class.  That was also the cooking class during which we bought the nice knife for chopping veggies which I continue to pass over in favor of a $5 paring knife from Meijer.  I am a weird person.

This week Mike and I are going to see a Dougie MacLean concert downtown.  Dougie MacLean is internationally known for Celtic music and I’ve been listening to him since my MI days so I was surprised to find tickets to see him so cheaply in Seattle!  Plus we’ll be seeing him at a venue we’ve been wanting to visit anyway.  However, if you’re thinking that Celtic music, particularly of the Dougie MacLean style, is more my kind of thing than Mike’s, it is.  He is graciously going with me, and I’m actually not sure how he’ll last through the concert.  When I’ve played Dougie MacLean music at home, Mike wrinkles his nose and moves one eyebrow up and one eyebrow down in the way that is reserved for things he’s seriously trying to like but not making much progress on.  I’m counting on the fact that Mike will fall in love with Dougie MacLean when he sees him live, but that may be overly optimistic on my part.

In other fun and interesting news, since Mike and I have a TV we’re going to do the P90X workout plan starting next Monday.  It’s a 90-day hard-core plan that lots of friends of ours have had great results from.  Mike has been wanting something to kick-start his workout plan, and we’ve decided on this.  It looks admittedly extremely infomercial-ish, and if I didn’t have a lot of friends who’ve vouched for it I wouldn’t even try it.  But it’s hard to argue with real results.  So anyway, we’re both excited about that.  We won’t be following the eating plan, though.  It’s very restrictive and I feel like with my food allergies my eating is already restrictive enough.  Plus, I also believe each person has only so much motivation on any given day, and if we’re already going to be using it to do hard-core workouts I don’t think we’ll have much left to do hard-core eating too.  About the most I’m planning on doing is buying some protein powder for post-workout fare.

Although Mike and I planned to try out a new restaurant last weekend, it didn’t end up happening.  On Friday night we went to the BBQ hosted by my work friend, and Mike ended up eating beef stew leftovers on Saturday (from the turnip beef stew as opposed to the parsnip beef stew which I’m making today) and the meatloaf that I made on Sunday.

We did go out to eat the weekend before that, though.

My giant plate of steamed kale at Smash. Clearly the chef understands me. 🙂

I asked Mike to smile and he managed a small one.  He also got some sort of chicken pasta that was good.

Hello Mike!

We’ll be going out to eat before the concert on Thursday though.  We’re not sure where we’ll be going.  One option is Wild Ginger which is an awesome Asian restaurant downtown and conveniently on the same street.  Or the Purple Cafe and Wine Bar which is just a few blocks away.  I’m leaning towards that place just because it’s supposed to be very good and we haven’t been there.  Or there are several more options which are slightly farther away, but they would be new restaurants for us to try.

Mike has just about all of the clutter cleared out of the living room after getting the TV, the TV stand, and a bookcase delivered.  Piper is a little disappointed now that the boxes are cleaned up and the clutter is going away.  For my part, I’ve been going through my clothes and getting rid of all the ones that I don’t want anymore in preparation for getting a bedroom set.  (Shockingly?), we’re both still using nightstands that I bought used for $5 each in college and dressers that each of us have had since our respective college days.  So we decided it was time to get matching furniture and get rid of the college dressers.  Fortunately Ikea is coming through again with an inexpensive set that we like.  Before we actually get that, though, I’d like to go through our clothes and throw out old stuff so that we’re not putting old clothes into new dressers, which reminds me of the Biblical reference of putting new wine into old bottles.

Yesterday over lunch I walked to Whole Foods.  It was a little rainy, a little cold, and a little windy, but it was nice.  I love seeing the changing seasons, and even though summer was nice it was HOT and I’m ready for fall.  🙂  On the flip side, they were all out of the garden vegetable soup I was planning on getting, probably because it’s colder today and more people were craving soup.

In Piper-related news, apart from the storms she’s been doing well.  She’s usually exhausted by Monday because she stays up most of the weekend hanging out with Mike and me.