2018 Germany Trip – Episode 4 – Berlin!

Returning to the high speed train from Munich to Berlin, we whizzed along, and the trip went quickly.  The plan was to reach Berlin around 5:30pm and figure out how many subway stops we needed to get to our hotel.  Unlike in Munich where the central train station connected to most of the U (subway) lines, in the central Berlin train station it only connected to a single limited subway line, whose goal seemed to be to get you somewhere else where you could easily transfer. I looked at the connecting stations so thoroughly during the train trip that I basically had our lines memorized before I got off the train in Berlin. Although I had diligently google’d the Berlin subway system during the train ride from Munich (clearly I believe in over-preparedness!), there was a dotted line connecting the subway line from the train station to the one we wanted that would get us to our hotel.  What does that mean??  All the other subway stations were connected by a solid line; I had no idea what to do with a dotted line.  (Even now, post-trip, I have no idea what a dotted line means!)  Mike and I walked down the train platform, went down an escalator, and took the one subway out of the train station for two stops until it reached the end of its line at the Brandenburg Tor station and then we looked around for another subway to take.  However, the line we needed to get to our hotel didn’t stop there.  So apparently what dotted lines meant for Mike and me was no cigar, no dice, and no way to the hotel without walking.  Basically there was no connection between our subway line and that one. We exited exited the subway station figuring that we could find a taxi above ground to get us to the hotel, and we found ourselves in front of the Brandenburg Gate.  It was gorgeous… all lit up and at the end of a boulevard lined with trees covered in blue Christmas lights. I recognized it from pictures, but hadn’t been prepared to see it just randomly exiting from a subway station. To be fair, I probably should have since the station was called “Brandenburg Tor” which means (you guessed it!), Brandenburg Gate in English.  However, we had all of our luggage with us, had been traveling for 4.5 hours by high speed train from Munich and weren’t really prepared for a Kodak moment.  Instead we grabbed a taxi and made a mental note to come back for pictures. Based on the way the cab driver tore around the curvy, crazy streets, we didn’t regret not renting a car. We entered the hotel around 6pm, tired but still ready to do a little something since we’d been on a train all day and hadn’t really been “doing” anything. We decided to take the subway to Potsdamer Platz, check out the Christmas market there (because every platz had a Christmas market!), and find some dinner.

At Potsdamer Platz!

 

The market at Potsdamer was in full swing!  Although gluhwine sounded mildly interesting, after a day of train travel and snacking, we wanted dinner!  And we found it in the form of a super crowded and fun Mexican restaurant.

Such a cool vibe!

 

Selfie time at the restaurant!

 

The food was amazing!  And so vegan-friendly!

I am not embarrassed in the slightest to say that I annihilated all of these veggies and rice! Yum!

 

Afterwards, we did a brief walk through a little of the Christmas market, but we were getting tired and it was getting late.

The Potsdamer Christmas market!

 

We took the subway back to the hotel, and while Mike bought bottled water from the hotel concierge, I looked at all the Berlin tourist brochures in the lobby and grabbed ten or twelve of them that looked interesting.  One especially caught my eye… it had a picture of a panda on the front!  Was it possible that there was a zoo in Berlin that had pandas?  I had never seen a live panda!  Mike looked at me suspiciously while we took the elevator up to our room.

“We aren’t going to go to like ten museums from all those brochures, are we?” he asked.  “I want to spend some time just experiencing the culture too.”

I wasn’t listening.  I was too busy poring over the panda brochure.  “Mike!  There’s a zoo with a panda!  Can we go?  Can we go?  Can we go??”

Mike could see that he wasn’t going to be able to go anywhere in Berlin with me until we had seen the zoo, so we made plans to go to the zoo the following morning.  We figured since it was a Friday, it shouldn’t be too busy.

After a good night’s sleep, during which I realized we had finally adapted to the German timezone, we went to the hotel’s breakfast (very satisfactory although it did not have quite as many options as the one in Munich), and then when we were well-fed and well-coffee’d, we headed to the subway to go to the zoo.  I was unreasonably excited.  In general, I’m not totally sure how I feel about zoos.  I don’t like the idea of animals being caged up, but I really, really do love seeing the animals.  I have seen some zoos which are very good about giving the animals the life they want (and sometimes animals actually end up with better lives in the zoo since they don’t get hunted, die of starvation, etc), and other zoos that don’t seem to care as much.  After reading up on the Berlin zoo the night before, I felt pretty confident that they were a sustainable zoo that was really focused on the well-being of the animals.

As we approached the front gate, I was excited!  The only thing I was a little iffy on was the temperature… it felt cold.  We bought our tickets and then headed in.  (Note: Prepare yourself for pictures, because I took a lot!!  The animals there seemed so content compared to other zoos I’ve been to and really seemed to want to have their pictures taken!  Or maybe they just all liked the cold weather?  No idea!

 

A beautiful mountain goat! He scampered over the rocks while we watched

 

We looked at various types of mountain goats for awhile, and then quickly realized that our strategy should be to spend a little time outdoors, then go into an indoor enclosure, then more time outdoors, then another indoor enclosure, etc.  That would be our best bet for staying as warm as possible throughout the day!  Based on that strategy, the ape house was our next stop.

 

A mandrill monkey… such an interesting face!

 

This was a gorilla rescue named Fatou!

 

Fatou has such a crazy story… she is the oldest living gorilla in the world!  She had just gotten her breakfast when we saw her.  She ate the mango right away and put the kale away for later.  Smart lady!

The chimpanzees were crazily active… swinging from rope to rope, chasing each other, and messing with each other.  They also chattered at each other the whole time and eventually ended up throwing poop at each other.  Clearly a nice and refined group!  😉  Interestingly I have heard that chimps are very aggressive.  They didn’t look aggressive with each other, although they were very definitely very active in swinging around with each other and teasing each other!

 

A PANDA!!

 

After we exited the ape house, we saw the panda exhibit just ahead!  The pandas were very active, so Mike and I stayed and watched them for awhile.  Unsurprisingly, they moved very much like grizzly bears… with kind of a lumbering gait.  They were beautiful!  🙂

 

These were a variation of a yak-type animal of which I forget the name.  Those horns!

 

The zebras were playful… one seemed to follow the other around everywhere and occasionally nudge her to get some attention

 

A friendly kookaburra who came right up and seemed like he wanted his photo taken

 

The Australian exhibit was very cool!  We saw some little kangaroos, a kookaburra, and a wombat (which my friend from Australia says can actually be really mean and charge you, but the one we saw didn’t seem to want to charge anything).

 

Although we were freezing by this point, the polar bears were not fazed

 

The polar bears were pretty active and seemed really engaged.  In retrospect, the brisk 38 degree weather was probably ideal for them, although Mike and I would have liked it a little warmer.

Arctic wolves

 

The arctic wolves were just gorgeous!  They seemed interested in the people going by and watched everyone intently.  Again, I think the temperatures were very arctic wolf-friendly!

 

We got a huge kick out of this sign!

 

Gorgeous!!

 

As the day went by, things warmed up slightly, but we were still pretty cold and looked for every opportunity to go indoors.  After a couple of hours we went into the zoo cafe and warmed up with some coffee.  That felt like it helped a lot, but by the time we went back outdoors again, our bodies felt like they were rebelling against all the cold we had exposed them to over the past week.  We had been consistently spending a lot of time outdoors for almost a week by this point.  At least it wasn’t snowing though!

 

The rhinos have hides so thick that they hardly seem real!

 

I was really appreciative to see that the rhinos they had at the zoo were rescue rhinos (notice their messed up horns… poor things!!).  Again, the Berlin Zoo seemed to be making a real effort to take care of animals, which I loved seeing.

 

Asian elephants!

 

The elephants had a different look to them, and I realized it was because they are Asian elephants instead of the Indian elephants I have typically seen in zoos.  They looked furrier and very friendly.

By this time we had been at the zoo for about four hours and we were freezing!  Fortunately the zoo and the aquarium were right next to each other.  Going into the aquarium and warming up and seeing sea life for awhile sounded amazing!

 

The Aquarium entrance

 

A very poorly taken picture of two sea turtles

 

They had a beautiful seahorse tank

 

Gorgeous jellyfish!

 

They had a lot of jellyfish tanks!  It was mesmerizing watching the jellyfish move… very slowly and rhythmically.

 

A huge school of jellyfish!

 

Puffer fish are some of my favorites… they always look like they’re smiling!

 

A shark!

 

The shark looked really cool but was very hard to get a good picture of because it moved constantly.  Some types of sharks have to move in order to breathe (as they swim, it forces water past their gills).  I’m not sure whether this shark was one of those varieties, but it definitely moved a lot!

 

A salt water tank with fish and coral

 

Mike loved the salt water tank.  The fish and coral in that tank were similar to the ones that he kept when he had a fish tank (although of course his tank was much smaller than this one!)

 

Mike at the coral tank!

 

We went back to this tank several times so Mike could get pictures from different angles… it was much bigger than it looks because it wrapped around the end of a wall and had two separate viewing spots!

 

An alligator-like animal?

 

I wasn’t sure what this was; it was in a big terrarium kind of exhibit with a lot of ponds, fish, etc, and I didn’t see a label specifically for what this was.  There were several of them, and none of them seemed in a great hurry to move.

When we exited the aquarium we felt nice and warmed up and ready for the next thing.

 

We saw this old church upon exiting the aquarium

 

We discovered that it was Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.  The spire was mostly gone from being bombed in 1943, but it hadn’t been repaired and had become a memorial instead.

After a quick lunch, we decided to spend some time in the urban, artsy Kreuzberg area of Berlin for the remainder of the afternoon.  We wandered around Kreuzberg for about an hour getting a sense of the vibe there.  It was full of graffiti, interesting and old buildings, and a very eclectic mix of people.  It was clearly a “happening” place for live music, bars, great restaurants, etc!  When it was getting dark and we were sufficiently cold, we headed into a bar to get some light food and drinks.

 

Relaxing in a Kreuzberg bar!

 

There was a jazz band playing in the bar and they sounded absolutely amazing!

 

Live jazz!

 

Afterwards, we headed back to the subway and then transferred a couple of times to get back to the subway station near our hotel.  Such a fun and full day!  The only real downside was the cold weather.  (I know I keep mentioning this, but it was a recurring theme in our outdoor activities!)  😉

We tried to sketch out a rough agenda for the following day, but ended up getting tired and falling asleep instead.  Finally we were on the normal German timezone and getting appropriately tired at bedtime like regular people!  🙂

 

2018 Germany Trip – Episode 2 – Downtown Munich

Jet lag really caught up with both of us Monday night/Tuesday morning.  We both basically fell asleep immediately, but then we both woke up wide awake around 3am. I had thought we were doing so well adjusting to the timezone switch but apparently not. I was awake and I was starving. Mike was able to fall back asleep for a few hours, but I mostly tossed and turned and did some reading on my phone. I was exhausted, but my body had decided that it was noon in Seattle and there was no need whatsoever for me to be asleep.  We were both completely ready for breakfast and headed down right when they opened at 6:15am.  Once again, the hearty breakfast helped wake us up and stabilize us.  The coffee also helped us feel more like it was morning and that we were ready to go! Our first stop was to find Mike some boots for the remainder of the trip. He had deliberately brought only Nike’s, planning on buying some boots in Germany, but it was really time to do that ASAP.  His feet were cold during the Neuschwanstein trip the day before, and it was snowing off and on in Munich.  The Nike’s really weren’t cutting it.  We stopped at a big department store near our hotel in search of boots, and Mike tried on several different pairs while I sat in a chair in the shoe area and tried not to fall asleep.  Mike found some good walking boots, and then we headed out again.  We stopped at a coffee shop on our way, and I realized that everyone in the coffee house was having a giant pretzel for breakfast.  This seemed to be a really normal breakfast in Bavaria, even though it would never occur to me to eat a giant pretzel for breakfast.  Mike drank coffee while I poured over the subway map I’d gotten from the hotel to figure out how to get us near Marienplatz, where I knew the largest Bavarian Christmas market was located.  We decided to make the Christmas market our last stop, since (although most of them opened around 11am), they really got going later in the evening when you could see all of the Christmas lights better.  And frankly hot, mulled wine sounded like a little much to my morning jetlagged self.  We decided to head in the general Marienplatz direction and visit the Residenz.  The Residenz had been the residence of the royal family of Bavaria for more than 700 years.  I did not realize this prior to our trip, but Bavaria is more than just a state of Germany.  They used to have their own kings and their own government, and interestingly there is apparently still something in their laws that gives them the right to secede from the country of Germany should they ever so desire.  The Bavarians are definitely an independent group!  The Residenz seemed particularly interesting to see since Ludwig II’s parents (the same Ludwig II that built Neuschwanstein Castle and Linderhof Palace) had lived there (and of course generations of their family before that).  Ludwig, being a “mad king” had opted to live outside of the political center of the city in Munich and build castles for himself up in the mountains, but normally he would have lived in the Residenz.  These days of course, the Residenz is just a tourist area since there is no longer a royal family of Bavaria, and Bavaria is all part of Germany.

Armed with those bits of historical knowledge, we hopped a subway to Odenplatz (lots of ‘platz’s’ in Germany; they are basically just squares or plazas).  Odenplatz, just outside of the Residenz, was gorgeous!

Giant lions in Odenplatz! This lion looks like he’s been through a lot…

 

We headed into the Residenz planning to just spend an hour there and then get lunch, but we got a little lost in the full opulence that we found there.  I was beginning to find it harder to see Ludwig II as a “mad king” for building castles after seeing the crazy opulence in which his parents lived in the Residenz.

Upon entering the Residenz one of the first things we saw was a giant gorgeous mural made entirely of tiny seashells.  I literally cannot imagine how long it would have taken for craftsmen to make that!

This is probably about a fifth of the giant seashell sculpture

 

Up close… ALL seashells!

The Queen’s throne room was crazy, but then the King’s was even crazier!  There were throne rooms, waiting rooms before you were ushered into the throne rooms, tea rooms, and in general so many rooms that I lost track of what they were all for.  So much was covered in gold leaf (just like in Ludwig II’s Linderhof Palace; clearly he hadn’t invented the “gold room” idea).

 

Part of the throne room… an actual room of gold…

 

A corner of the King’s private throne room… more gold!

They also had a giant hall that contained sculptures, portraits, and reliefs of ancestors of the royal family.

High ceilings covered in paintings!

 

The hall had a giant, echoey feeling… surprisingly dark as well.

 

When we got out of the Residenz we were starving.  We were close to the Hofbrauhaus, so we decided to stop there, figuring that it wouldn’t be busy on a random Tuesday for lunch.

The famous Hofbrauhaus!

We were definitely mistaken!  It was packed, and we couldn’t find a seat, despite the fact that it’s huge and there are long wooden benches and tables everywhere.  There was also a live polka band playing, and everyone really seemed to be getting into the music.  I had no idea how to even flag down a waiter or waitress since everyone seemed to be rushing around carrying giant liter (yes I mean LITER) size mugs of beer.  We decided to come back another day and instead went across the courtyard to another restaurant.  They had a burger for Mike and hot chestnut soup for me.  Delicious and warming after coming in out of the cold!

I looked over the to-do list I had assembled earlier at the hotel and realized we were close to St. Peter’s Church.  If you paid a Euro, you could climb up the stairs to the top of the bell tower and get a great view of Munich.  That seemed like an excellent pre-Christmas market activity, so we headed over to the Church a few blocks away.  We paid our Euros, and it sounded like the person who took our money told us that it was 33 flights of stairs to the top.  That frankly sounded like a lot of steps, especially since we’d been on our feet for most of the day and it was now around 3pm.  However, we decided we could always reward ourselves with hot mulled wine afterwards, so we started the climb.

The steps were definitely not new steps…

After the first flight Mike took his coat off.  I was torn.  Definitely climbing stairs was a hot, sweaty activity, and I could see taking my coat off for it.  But the old stone tower was so drafty that as soon as I took my coat off, my sweat chilled and stuck to my body in the drafty stairway, which made me cold and want to put my coat back on again.

Wood and stone! We discovered later that the church was built in 1368. No wonder it was drafty!

We were ready for the long haul of 33 flights, but we actually reached the top after 13 flights.  Apparently we had misheard the man at the bottom!  Kind of a relief!  13 flights wasn’t very much at all.  However, when we went out onto the viewing area encircling the top of the bell tower, it actually felt like we were 33 flights up.  We were *high*.  Munich felt like a long way below!  Normally I don’t have problems with heights, but this felt like a little much.  The experience was heightened because the snow had picked up and the little walkway around the bell tower was slippery from the fresh snow, and the wind was strong which made me feel as though I could be blown off the edge even though of course there was a railing and I couldn’t be blown over it.

Munich from St. Peter’s Church bell tower

Regardless, whether it made sense or not, being out on the viewing platform was an adrenaline-inducing experience, especially when gusts of wind would blow by and make me feel unsteady on my feet.  I was happy to get some pictures and then get back into the bell tower and start our descent!  If you want to see what the 360 degree panoramic view looks like on a nice day, you can take a look here.

By the time we climbed back down the bell tower stairs we were exhausted.  It had been a busy day, and a cold day out in the snow.  Since St. Peter’s Church was right next to the Viktualienmarkt (a daily farmer’s market), we took a look at that too.

Everything looked so fresh!

 

 

Mike also decided to get another cup of coffee.  Nothing like hot coffee after wandering the cold, snowy streets!

Ordering coffee at a cozy, warm cafe

Although coffee can be found in Germany, it is definitely not as prevalent there as it is in the U.S., or even in Italy.  There generally just aren’t as many coffee shops, and the coffee is also generally just not great.  However, it still contained caffeine so Mike survived.  🙂

After we browsed the Viktualienmarkt (sp?), we thought about going straight to the Marienplatz Christmas market but ended up deciding that we wanted to rest and warm up before spending more time out in the snow, so we walked back to our hotel. We planned to just have a short rest, but jetlag took over again, and we both completely passed out and woke up three hours later, around 8pm, and decided to head to Marienplatz. This time, though, I figured out how to optimize our subway trip so that instead of taking one subway and walking the rest of the way, we took two subways (i.e. we transferred), and then we basically walked up the stairs from the subway and directly into the heart of the Marienplatz Christmas market!

We were greeted by the old town hall at one end of Marienplatz as we emerged from the subway station!

 

The festivities were in full force, which woke Mike and me up the rest of the way and got us into the Christmas spirit.

Gluhwein at Marienplatz!

I had heard about gluhwein (hot wine muddled with spices) from Mike since his Berlin trip years ago.  Now I got to experience gluhwein first-hand!  There are so many places selling gluhwein all over Germany during the month of December that you can either pay more to get gluhwein in a ceramic, reusable mug, or you can bring your own mug and pay vendors less for just the gluhwein.  Because every gluhwein vender has mugs with different designs on them, it’s fun to browse all the vendors first to see what kind of mug you’d like.  They come in all shapes and sizes… some mugs were very tall and skinny, some were shaped like a boot, and some were normal mugs.  Mike and I both opted for normal mug-shaped ones.  Mike chose an orange one with King Ludwig II on it, and I chose a navy blue one with an angel and stars on it.  As fun as the whole gluhwein atmosphere is in the market, I have to say that wine isn’t my favorite alcoholic beverage, and spiced wine is pretty strong even as wine goes!  I decided that for the future, either the kid’s version (watered down gluhwein) or grog (white wine and rum) were much more my speed.  Regardless, the gluhwein experience was fun and festive!

One of the gluhwein stands

 

I couldn’t believe how beautiful Marienplatz was!

The mix of the old and the new (only relatively new… still old compared to most of what we have in the U.S.), even just within the Marienplatz square was striking.  I loved it!  The whole Christmas market had such a fun, family-friendly, festive atmosphere.  We spent some time shopping at the booths and drinking our gluhwein before deciding to call it a night.  Now that we knew the trick to getting between our hotel and Marienplatz basically entirely underground, we had a warm, dry subway ride back to the hotel!

More to come later…

Star Wars and Shepherd’s Pie

It has been rainy in Seattle.  I am definitely not complaining given the pictures from Boston that all of my team members are sending me of snow drifts that are up to the windowsills, but it has been putting a little damper on my commute.  As a refresher, my commute consists of two buses, so I spend a lot of time walking between buses, and consequently getting wet.  Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, I had an cheap umbrella that I really liked from H&M that was black and had star constellations on it, but it is lost.  Lost as in I have no idea where it is, but I have the vague idea that it should be somewhere.  I keep meaning to look for it, but I only think of it when I’m outside and getting wet and don’t think of it at all as soon as I’m inside again.  Maybe that will be a good weekend project.

In related news, I have a winter hat with an epic puff ball on the top.  That has been keeping my head warm and dry during my commute with no umbrella, but I realized today that the puff is looking a little sad and bedraggled.  At first I was confused.  Everyone wears hats in the rain, right?  The hat (puff included) must be designed to handle rain.  But then it slowly dawned on me that I’m probably one of the few people who actually wears a puff hat in the rain.  Most people use an umbrella in the rain and a puff hat in the snow.  So I now have the disturbing feeling that I’m misusing the hat.  Maybe it really is time to find the umbrella and retire the puff hat before I ruin it in the rain.

In other (somewhat weather-related) news, my next Boston trip is planned for the end of January.  Fingers crossed their Bomb Cyclone finishes up and they get a (very) late Indian summer while I’m there.  If I can avoid snow entirely, I’m all for that.  However, I would be shocked if I’m that lucky.  It is Boston in late January after all.  😉  Mike is likely going to China again in February as well, so it’ll be a few months of travel for us again.  And I just finished using up my travel-sized container of contact solution.  Time to get a new one!

Mike and I have been continuing our Nero Wolf evening habit.  Most evenings we watch one episode, and they’re only 45 min, so they’re perfect bite-size chunks to watch.  This weekend, though, we bit the bullet and went to the movie theater to see the new Star Wars movie.  I was surprised how many people there were given that it opened a month ago.  For some reason Star Wars just has a cult following of people.  As usual, the story line was fairly interesting, although somehow it always feels a little deja vu (i.e. how is it that the Resistance never has any real ships or manpower and the Republic has millions of Storm Troopers and epic ships, but somehow the Resistance is never wiped out?  But I guess if I’m looking for realistic scenarios, Star Wars probably isn’t the place to look.  On the upside, the BB-8 droid was just as cute in this one as he was in the first one, and there was an addition of some adorable bird-like creatures called Porgs.  I understand some people felt like the Porgs were annoying, but to me they were one thing that was actually new in the movie.  And did I mention they were adorable?

On the way back from the movie, it completely randomly occurred to me that it had been a long time since I’d seen a spider in our house.  For awhile after moving in, we were seeing some pretty big ones in the basement, and while I’m not terrified of spiders I’m really not a fan either and would strongly prefer they stayed outside.  I voiced the thought to Mike that I hadn’t seen a spider in awhile, and he paused to think.

“Oh.  I saw one like a week ago.”

“What?  Really?  Where?  The basement?”

“No.  The main floor.”

“Where on the main floor?”

“The dining room.”

“Was it a big spider?”

“Not the biggest one I’ve seen in the house, but it was pretty big.”

“Did you kill it??”

“No.  It ran underneath something.”

I looked at him in disbelief.  His eyes met mine.

“I shouldn’t have told you that, should I?  It didn’t make your life better in any way.”

“Correct,” I told him emphatically.  “You could have just stayed quiet when I was talking about spiders.”

“Yeah…” he said with a grin.  “Somehow I always have the problem of telling you things I shouldn’t.”

As much as I appreciate his truthfulness, I really would have been fine with him withholding that particular bit of information.  Now I get to sit on my computer in the dining room noticing each shadow and bit of fluff and wondering if there’s a spider ready to run across my bare feet.

In other news, I have been on a huge grapefruit kick.  Maybe it’s just that citrus is in season in the winter and reminds me of summer and warmer, brighter days, but I have been eating one grapefruit a day.  Hopefully there aren’t any health-related issues with eating too many grapefruit.  If there are, I’ll let you know.  I know of at least one non-health related problem with eating grapefruit.  They are notoriously messy and seem to spray citrus juice everywhere.  Short of eating one on a sea of paper towels, I’m not sure how to avoid getting the table all messy and having to clean it up afterwards.

Mike and I went out for a quick dinner at an Indian restaurant near our house after seeing Star Wars, and that was surprisingly relaxing.  We really haven’t been going out for dinner much these days, so it felt like a treat.  I had the spicy eggplant bhartha, and Mike had chicken tikka masala and some paneer-stuffed naan, which he said was pretty good.

On Sunday I woke up early to a bunch of rain.  I met my running buddy at 7:30 for a run, and we went 14 miles, which is farther than we’ve gone in probably six months.  Marathon training is beginning!  The run went by surprisingly fast since we were catching up on our week’s, but those last couple of miles we were both waiting for the end.  Those are always the toughest miles when starting to ramp up the mileage again.  Next week is 16 miles, and then we drop back for a few weeks.  That’s great since I’ll be in Boston one of those weeks anyway and would probably get lost if I attempted a 14 mile run in Boston.  All of the streets there are confusing and meander in curvy S-shapes that leave even the most directionally-astute person somewhat turned around.  And I am far from the most directionally astute person.  In fact, on my last trip there, I got lost trying to find a boxing gym half a mile away from the hotel.  Multiple times.  And had to use the GPS on the phone to keep from wandering the streets of Boston all night.

I did a bunch of cooking on Sunday afternoon, singing along to songs on the Sonos speakers while I did so.  Mike is so funny.  There are some meals that he just loves, and one of them is shepherd’s pie.  I made a shepherd’s pie on Sunday, and around 6pm Sunday evening I asked Mike if he was hungry for dinner, and he said not really.  Then he wandered over to the kitchen where I had food cooling before sticking it in the fridge, and he spotted a shepherd’s pie I’d just made.  His eyes lit up.

“What’s this?”

“Shepherd’s pie.”

“Oh.  And it’s ready now?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have some?”

“Sure, but you said you weren’t hungry.”

“Well.  I guess I could have some.”

He had some.  Then he had seconds.  And when he came home from work today and I told him I’d heat up dinner for him, he asked, “Is there any shepherd’s pie?”

So clearly at least that meal went over well.  🙂

The rest of the week has been getting back in the swing of work after the holidays!  The days are still dark, but my coworker told me that we are gaining two minutes of daylight every day.  At that rate, our July days should be pretty amazing.  😉

Happy Monday everyone!

A Shiny New Year

How is it already 2018?   A brand new year.  Maybe it will be a year of more consistent blogging.  Why not?  It’s a time for new beginnings!

Every year I try to make New Year’s resolutions, and everyone around me admonishes me and tells me I need to focus on “goals” instead of resolutions, and I can make goals anytime; not just at New Years.  While I guess that’s true, there’s something nice about starting “goals”, “resolutions”, or whatever other terminology grabs you, on the first day of a new year, all else being equal.

My year is off to a fairly inauspicious start.  I went to boxing on the Friday before New Years, and the boxing instructor had us doing weighted squats.  I’ve done weighted squats in the past, but haven’t done them at all in the past few years, but after five sets of those combined with weighted lunges, my legs were toast.  And by “toast”, I mean that I woke up Saturday morning pretty much unable to sit down and requiring stair railings and handicap bathrooms.  To say that my glues (aka butt) was sore would have been a gross understatement.  Going up and down stairs was next to impossible, and when I told Mike my butt was sore and he jokingly slapped my butt, I let out a screech that neighbors five doors down could have heard.  I work out often enough that I’m no stranger to sore muscles, but this was different entirely.  I told Mike I was swearing off squats and even went so far as to suggest that I would get a shirt made that said “I don’t do squats.” and wear it to subsequent gym sessions.  Mike even drove me to the grocery store rather than me walking there (which is what I would typically do).

I foam rolled and stretched for almost an hour Saturday night while Mike and I watched a Nero Wolf mystery, and that had me feeling slightly better, but certainly not back to normal and certainly not able to do any squats.  I had a twelve-mile run planned with my running buddy Anna on Sunday morning, and I really didn’t want to cancel it because of uncooperative glutes unless I absolutely had to.  Sunday morning, I felt like a long run would be doable, although probably not enjoyable.  Fortunately Anna was somewhat sore from a gym session on Saturday, so we took our time on the run.  The first eight miles weren’t too bad, but that last four miles every single muscle in my lower legs was screaming.  It had been a while since I was that happy to be finished with a run.  I got back home exhausted.  Not so much because of the run itself, but because of struggling against my sore legs the whole time.  I basically showered and collapsed on the couch.  I pulled myself off of the couch an hour later to get a slow cooker meal started for Mike, but I felt tired and out-of-it enough that it took me longer to get the ingredients together than usual.  Piper seemed to sense the way I was feeling and she mostly seemed to want to hang out on the couch with me.  I had eaten after my run, but it wasn’t until I ate an orange and a couple of handfuls of chocolate chips that my energy levels bounced back (I’m crediting those dark chocolate chips… yum!).

With my brain now powered by the energy from the chocolate chips, I realized that I had turned the slow cooker on four hours earlier but had forgotten to actually plug it in.  So I basically had four-hour-old room-temperature chicken sitting on my counter.  Oops.  I called myself all kinds of names for forgetting to plug the slow cooker in and wasting the ingredients, but Mike shrugged and told me that everyone makes mistakes sometimes and I should just forget about it.  “Unless you always forget to plug the slow cooker in,” he said.  “If that’s the case, you probably need to re-think your process of preparing slow cooker meals.”  Good advice as usual coming from Mike’s corner.

In the absence of the chicken meal, Mike and I ended up going out for New Years Eve to a restaurant near our house called Eve.  It actually worked out perfectly because they were completely booked for later times (i.e. 8pm, 9pm), but there was literally no one there yet at 6pm when we went.  Apparently everyone else wants to actually be at the restaurant when the New Year officially starts at midnight, but for those of us who can’t stay up till midnight without the help of many cups of coffee anyway (me), having a 6pm dinner and getting out of the restaurant before the NYE partiers show up works well.  🙂  We had a relaxing dinner that was really filling in a restaurant that was mostly empty.  It was a fun way to end the year!

On Monday there was a special New Year’s yoga class at the yoga studio I’ve been going to, so I went to that, hoping it would work out the rest of my glute and quad soreness.  It did, in fact, work out my soreness, but it was the hardest yoga class I’ve ever taken.  It was a special New Year’s class where you do 108 surya namaskar flows.  Just for reference, each surya namaskar includes at least one push-up… sometimes as many as three, depending on the variation.  So it was an hour and a half class in 102 degree heat with really challenging flows.  Wow!!  Great class, but HARD.  The good news is that I sweated absolutely everything out in that class including my soreness, so my legs are finally usable again.  I didn’t really think that’s what it would take to get them back to normal!

I took the Christmas tree down today, and I think Piper wasn’t really thrilled about it.  To be honest, neither was I.  It’s always a little depressing to put all the lights and ornaments away and realize that you’re still only in the beginning stages of winter and have a lot of days ahead with little daylight, lots of rain (or snow), but that you have no fun holidays or decorations to break up those months.  Oh well.  In all honesty, we were having light problems with our tree anyway, so we couldn’t have kept it up indefinitely.  Three days before New Years, the integrated incandescent lights in the top quarter of our tree stopped working, so the tree looked kind of lopsided.  Sometime before next Christmas we need to figure out if there’s a good way to fix our current tree, or whether we should just get a new fake tree.  Mike suggested that maybe we should just get a real tree next year, but I’m not super excited about killing a tree and getting pine needles all over the floor.  Regardless, we have another eleven-ish months to figure it out!

In a freak twist, we had a white Christmas in Seattle.  It started snowing on Christmas Eve, and then all of the snow melted by December 27th.  That’s just about the correct amount of snow in my opinion.  Just enough for a white Christmas, but nothing extraneous to hang around and mess up commuting.  😉

I hope everyone had an amazing New Year’s!  Here comes 2018!

Welcoming 2016!

Well, here we are in 2016.  How are we already in 2016?  In a way it feels like I have done so much in 2015, but on the other hand, it doesn’t seem like another year could possibly be gone!  Let’s go over where Mike and I were this time last year.

• I was two months into an eight month yoga teacher training class and still a little nervous about actually doing yoga teaching.
• Mike and I were still living in an apartment with no buying prospects.
• Piper was not receiving twice daily injections from me.
• Mike was still working at Fluke.
• I had just quit Amazon but hadn’t yet started at Groupon.

A lot has happened in 2015!  It will probably be difficult for 2016 to measure up, but we’ll see how it goes.  🙂

I have officially survived the holiday store closures of the Christmas/New Year’s season!  For some reason that is completely unknown to me, I get a little freaked out when the grocery stores are closed on Christmas Day (and to a lesser degree I also freak out a little when they have shorter hours for Christmas Eve, New Year’s, etc).  I have literally no idea why this is.  It’s not as though I go to the grocery store every day.  It’s not as though there aren’t grocery stores that are open, even on Christmas Day (the one that’s right by our house is closed, but if we drove a mile we could get to one that was open).  It’s not as though we have nothing in the house to eat even if I don’t go to the grocery store.  It’s not even as though we’d starve if we literally had nothing to eat on Christmas Day.  But despite all logical, common-sense arguments to the contrary I freak out a little bit inside when I know that I will be unable to run to the store if I unexpectedly run out of something.  What am I afraid of?  “Oops… that was the last of the milk.  OH NO!  Now Mike can’t have milk for 24 hours!  No CEREAL!  No PROTEIN DRINKS!  No MILK AND COOKIES!”  In case you were wondering, this is what is officially meant by the term “first-world problems”: twenty-four hours without the ability to buy anything from a fully-featured grocery store a five-minute walk from one’s house results in a crisis.

Mike and I spent a very quiet New Year’s… we thought about going out at night, but we are both kind of tired of going out when it’s dark outside (which happens almost always this time of year because the days are so short).  It’s much nicer being outside while it’s light outside.  So we went out during the day and then spent a quiet evening at home watching a movie.

Mike and I have been seeing a lot of movies lately.  I’m not sure what’s up with that.  I think the key is that usually Mike wants to watch scary movies, and I don’t, and then we compromise by watching nothing.  (Great compromise, huh?)   Over Christmas/New Year’s though we’ve both opened up our horizons (and Mike has laid off the scary movies at least for now), and we’ve seen several interesting movies together.  We kicked off our movie spree by seeing the new Quentin Tarantino movie The Hateful Eight in 70mm film.  In case you don’t know much about film (which I absolutely didn’t), all modern movies are filmed in digital.  Old school movies were filmed in 35mm film.  And a very few epic films were filmed in 70mm film (movies like Ben Hur and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World).  And of course Quentin Tarantino who loves the glorious film days of old, filmed his new movie in 70mm film and wanted it screened in a longer “roadshow” version in select theaters nationwide using a film projector (i.e. not a digital film projector).  The special roadshow version was screening in one of the Seattle theaters, and Mike and I bought tickets immediately and made plans to go with some friends of ours.  We had dinner before the movie with our friends, and got to the movie about fifteen minutes early.  That was clearly not early enough, because the theater was already almost full and we had to sit down in the front row area.  I’ve only sat in that super front area once before when watching Ocean’s Eleven (so obviously a long time ago!).  We settled in our seats, which were really comfortable and enjoyed the show.  Well, enjoyed might be the wrong word.  Tarantino movies are always interesting in that I  never ever have any idea what’s going to happen next, but they’re usually pretty extremely violent so ‘enjoy’ is a strange word to use for them.  About fifteen minutes in, the projector temporarily broke and had to be readjusted (clearly the older film projector is not being maintained these days), but someone got it up and running again in about a minute.  I heard that a lot of theaters had “technical” problems related to the film projector, but our experience was fortunately mostly good.  It was strange to see the flickery artifacts of film on a screen again… I haven’t seen those in a really long time!  All in all, it was a fun evening.

Then Mike wanted to see the new Star Wars, so we went to see that.  And I will say absolutely nothing about it since I’ll just end up spoiling something for someone who hasn’t seen it yet.  Instead I will just say that Mike and I thought it was better than the three prequels but not as good as the three originals.  Which is likely in the range everyone thinks it will fall.  And I will say that I love, love, love BB8!  Cutest droid EVER!  Apparently I’m not alone in thinking this since you can buy your own little motorized BB8 droid from BestBuy and from Brookstone.

I chose The Intern to watch.  It’s a movie starring Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway in which Anne Hathaway’s character owns a startup internet-based business and Robert De Niro comes in as part of a senior intern program.  Really interesting and left Mike and me with lots of food for thought!  And of course, it’s basically impossible for either Anne Hathaway or Robert De Niro to pull off a bad acting performance, so the acting was really good.

For our final movie of 2015, we watched The Hidden Fortress.  And I really don’t know what to say about it.  It’s a 1958 Japanese movie (but with English subtitles).  It was a good story, but it was definitely a really old movie.  I think overall I feel that it was very well-done, but wouldn’t work well with the short attention spans of modern mainstream audiences.  There were long stretches where nothing significant seemed to happen, and Mike and I watched it in several chunks.  Still, a very interesting movie to round out our 2015 movie watching!

Also, in the spirit of closing out 2015 with a bang, Mike and I started a 1500 piece jigsaw puzzle.  This was most definitely my idea, but Mike was fairly ok with it even though he had no great desire to spend time doing a jigsaw puzzle.  I can now say that I finally understand why people need dining room tables; they need a place to spread out 1500 similarly-sized jigsaw puzzle pieces.  I literally don’t know how you could do a puzzle this big without a pretty large table.  So, for the moment, there’s only one end of the table that we can actually eat on and instead of being a dining table it’s really turned into a puzzle table which we occasionally also use for eating.

Mike and I have also been doing some cleaning in the spirit of entering 2016 with more of a clean slate.  Last night Mike wanted me to come downstairs to see his cleaning progress on his room.  I had Piper in my lap and told him I’d be down later when Piper wasn’t on my lap anymore.  Mike walked straight to the kitchen, got out a salmon treat from the fridge, left the fridge door open, and put the salmon treat next to Piper’s food dish.  Piper and I both jumped up immediately, Piper to get the salmon treat and me to close the fridge door.  Mike grinned mischievously.

“Looks like I got you both up at once,” he said.  “Want to come see my cleaning progress downstairs?”

Score one for Mike.  😉

The weather here has been really cold lately!  It hasn’t been precipitating, but if it were it would be snowing.  As it is, there is frost on the leaves in the morning (and the frost pretty much stays there until the sun hits the leaves… which given how short our days are sometimes doesn’t happen).  I’ve still been running (in fact, this is actually pretty great running weather since it’s been dry and sunny, even though it’s cold).

I wanted to make New Year’s resolutions this year (and pretty much every year).  Mike didn’t want to, but I remembered that when I talked about New Year’s resolutions to one of the personal trainers at our gym, the trainer said he didn’t like ‘resolutions’ because it sounded weak.  He preferred ‘goals’.  So I asked Mike if we could set New Year’s ‘goals’, and Mike agreed right away.

Score one for Karena.  😉

As far as Piper goes, she is feeling much, much better.  She’s back to playing, tearing around the house, and spending a lot of time looking out the windows and watching people and dogs go by.  I took her to the follow-up appointment at the vet, and she no longer has a UTI which is awesome and means that these antibiotic injections are working.  To make sure the bacteria is 100% gone, I’ll be continuing to give her injections for the next month and then she’ll go back to the vet for a final follow-up appointment.  And the injections are really ‘old hat’ at this point, as surprising as that seems to me.  It helps a lot that Piper is really cooperative.  She hates the injections but she sits still for them.  And who knew I would become so adept at changing needles on syringes, mixing up antibiotics, and giving injections?  Certainly not one of my aspirations for 2015, but things happen!  I called the vet so many times with questions over the first few weeks that I think they were probably ready to block my calls entirely.

I suppose Mike and I will have to take down our Christmas tree soon.  *Sigh*  We have really enjoyed it, and I loved having all the twinkly lights from the tree on when I came downstairs in the morning, but oh well.  Mike says we need to put it away soon so that it’s special when we put it up next year.  True, and even a little profound.  🙂  Happy 2016!

Happy 3rd Anniversary to Us!

Mike and I have had a really busy December… I mean a really, really busy December.  With Mike’s long hours the past week or so, I haven’t been doing much cooking so all my careful weekly food prep is kind of out the window right now.  (Hopefully I’ll get back on board after the holidays… it can be one of my New Year’s resolutions.  Which reminds me… I should look back to last year’s resolutions and see if I got anywhere with them!)

Anyway, Mike has been working a lot, and I have spent my evenings shuttling Piper around to the vet, giving her meds, running errands, etc.  It’s all good, but Mike and I will both be glad of a little time off over Christmas and New Years!

Fortunately, we both took time to celebrate our third wedding anniversary.  I feel like it should actually be our 10th anniversary instead of our third since we’ve actually been together over 10 years, but oh well.  We’ll go with three.  Three is a good number.

I made plans to go to a live show and dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse downtown.  I have co-workers from Brazil, so I have discovered the entity that is the ‘Brazilian Steakhouse’.  I even bought a Groupon for it (yay Groupon!), so it was much cheaper than it would have normally been.  We got there, and the interior was just beautiful!  Dimly lit, dark wood… very lovely!  We had a very relaxing time hanging out, listening to their live Brazilian music, and making multiple trips to their super amazing all-you-can-eat salad bar.  I came back from my first trip to the salad bar with a hugely overloaded plate full of exotic olives, sliced veggies, roasted veggies, pickled veggies, and a few odds and ends like roasted mushroom salad (SOOOO good!  And I don’t even like mushrooms!) and quinoa salad.  Mike’s eyes shot up when he saw how full my plate was.

Mine is the plate on the right. 😉

“Are you going to be able to eat all that??” he asked.

“Ha!” I said.  “You’ve actually been with me for ten years without knowing the copious amounts of vegetables I’m able to eat?”

I not only ate that whole plate but I went back for another similarly-sized one.  Mike shook his head while he attacked our meat platter.

Lots of different types of meat

 

Suffice it to say we both left absolutely stuffed!  Great food, great atmosphere, great company!  Here’s to three years and hopefully many more!

Mike relaxing

It has been raining cats and dogs out here.  And I don’t mean typical Seattle rain… I mean, rain pouring from the sky, rivers flowing down the street kind of rain.  Every time I mention to Mike how much it is raining, he says, “Well, our plants are probably happy.”  This is the difference in perspective when you become a home owner, I guess!

Seattle rain and fog. This is what we’re known for. This and coffee.

On Tuesday I took my CPR refresher class after work.  It’s probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve taken the class, so you wouldn’t think there would ever be any new info in them, but surprisingly each instructor has a different background and a different take on the info so I always find that the time goes by really fast and I always pick up some useful nuggets of information.  One of Tuesday’s nuggets: if you are alone and encounter a person who needs CPR, you should first call 9-1-1 and then start CPR if the person is an adult; you should do two minutes of CPR and then call 9-1-1 if the person is a child.  Interesting.  Also of interest: King County (Seattle) has the highest rate of survival for cardiac arrest in the world.  I seem to remember hearing that in my last CPR class, too, so maybe it’s been at the top of the list for the past two years?  Not sure on that one!  Last item (potentially) of interest: My bottom hand when doing CPR was really sore the next day and felt bruised.  Maybe I’m a little bit too enthusiastic in my CPR?  Anyway, now I’m all renewed for my personal trainer cert for the next two years.

I went to Piper’s vet one evening after work last week to get a refresher course in giving antibiotic injections since guess who is not responding to the current antibiotic?  If you guessed Piper, you’re wrong.  It’s the bacteria in Piper’s bladder.  Apparently those bacteria are resistant to the antibiotic pill that’s been working so well for us for the past couple of years.  Don’t use antibacterial soap, folks.  This is what it leads to: resistant bacteria.  Maybe if Piper wasn’t always washing her paws with antibacterial soap…

Anyway, we’ll see how well twice daily injections go over with Piper.  And with me!  We have fallen into a good rhythm with the subcutaneous fluids that I give her every other day.  That just feels a lot less often than the twice a day antibiotics I’m now giving her.  It feels like I’m always calculating when 12 hours has passed and it’s time to give her another injection.  But onward and upward, right?  That’s Piper’s feeling.

We had stuff spread out on the table here, and she was very interested!

Mike and I did some Christmas shopping for our nieces last weekend and ended up at Toys ‘R’ Us.  Holy cow!  That store is crazy!  Has it always been that giant and that crowded??  Somehow as a kid the only time I remember being there was when I got a new bike and I really only remember the bike aisle.  But there seemed to be just millions and millions of toys.  One of our nieces likes the Elves and Friends lego sets.  I totally do too, although I don’t own any!  Cora, you and I should hang out and play legos!!  🙂  I am not too old for that!  😉

Last weekend I went for a run  at 4:30pm, which at this time of year in Seattle might as well be midnight.

This is 4:30pm! How is that even possible??

 

Love this bridge at night! (Or, you know, 4:30pm)

 

I had heard of the movie Love Actually multiple times through the years as a good, British Christmas movie, but had never watched it.  Well, I decided this was the year to see it!  Piper and I watched it while Mike was working late, and it was so good!  At least I liked it.  Lots of different, heart-warming stories going on, some happy and some sad.  So good!  Warning if you decide to watch it: I cried through the last twenty minutes and I’m not typically a movie crier.  But there’s only so many heart-warming love stories I can withstand at one time, and this movie has like fifteen.  I made Mike watch it with me later (and he agreed only if he could drink a beer while watching).  I again cried through the last twenty minutes (even though I completely knew what was coming this time) and Mike didn’t cry at all, shrugged at the end, and said they were nice enough stories.  We are going to see the special Christmas release of Quentin Tarantino’s new movie Hateful Eight on Christmas Eve, and I strongly suspect that will be much more Mike’s speed that Love Actually.  🙂

Our Christmas Day plans are still undecided, which at this point probably means we don’t have any.  Which is fine!  We’ll both have Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, so that makes for a four-day weekend.  I should probably get my cooking in gear enough to at least make a nice meal even if it’s not the over-the-top traditional Christmas meal.  I asked Mike if he wanted to order the pre-cooked meal from the local grocery store this year, but he said that a whole turkey is always so much food.  Which it is.  And that we’ll end up wasting most of it.  Which we will.  And that we’ll forget to freeze the turkey before it goes bad.  Which we always do.  So I think we’ll go for something smaller and less traditional this year, but I haven’t decided what yet.  Maybe something Mexican?  Quesadillas maybe??

Piper has decided that she likes the Christmas tree, so it turns out that our little Halloween cat is also a Christmas cat!

Halloween Christmas Cat!

 

Merry Christmas from our family to yours!  (Because sadly as busy as things have been with Mike’s work and with Piper’s health the past couple months I haven’t gotten any Christmas cards out at all).  So a blog ‘Merry Christmas’ callout to friends and loved ones may be the closest we get this year!

One of our neighbors came over and dropped off a plate of Christmas cookies one day this week… all different flavors and types… just the kind of plate my mom would make up (although no frosted cut-out cookies… Mom, you’re still the only person I know hard-core enough to make those!)   I am so full of admiration… both of them work full time…. where do they find the time to make a big variety of Christmas cookies?  Clearly I need some lessons in time management!

Anyway, Merry Christmas again, from the west coast Danenberg household!  Sending lots of love for a wonderful 2016!  🙂

Our first Christmas tree and our hungry cat

Friday morning by chance I ended up riding the bus downtown with a neighbor from the townhome next door.  We talked all the way, and she told me that the young couple renting one of the other townhomes in our complex got engaged over the weekend!  How exciting!  The neighbor I was talking with already guessed this was happening before she “officially” found out because she saw a trail of rose petals going down the stairs at the back of the town home complex and guessed that Dan was proposing.  Coincidentally, I also saw the trail of rose petals, but a romantic meaning never even remotely occurred to me.  I assumed someone had gotten a flowering shrub for their landscaping and it shed some petals as they carried it to the house.  That’s really sad, right?  I mean, that kind of puts me in the hopeless category.  It’s a good thing it would never even remotely occur to Mike to do anything like that for me, because it wouldn’t remotely occur to me what to do with it.  This is called ‘compatibility’.  😉  I was feeling like I was about as hopeless as you could get short of being dead when I texted Mike the news.

“I rode the bus into work with our neighbor.  Dan proposed, and now he and Amy are engaged!  :)”

A minute later Mike texted back.

“I thought they were married.”

I texted back instantly, “What?  No!  They were dating.  They’re our neighbors a few doors down… Amy’s a med student doing residency.  Do you know who I’m talking about?”

“Yes.”

“Ok well they aren’t married, but now they’re engaged.  You kind of took the excitement out of that.”

“Sorry.”

So I may be hopeless as far as romanticism goes, but at least I know the marital status of our neighbors.  Unlike some people.  😉

Piper and I have been navigating the murky waters of subcutaneous fluid injections.  We’re semi-getting there.  Injecting a cat, especially one who now knows that it’s coming, isn’t typically very easy.  And surprise, surprise, Piper has discovered that she doesn’t like getting a shot in the neck and having to sit still for seven minutes while I inject fluids into her.  But we’ll see how things go over the next couple weeks.

The skies in Seattle have been pouring rain the past several days!  It doesn’t exactly feel wintry, but it definitely feels Christmasy.  I guess we’ve been in Seattle a long time when “Christmasy” means super short days and lots of rain.

Mike and I had originally decided not to get a full-size Christmas tree this year.  Big trees are expensive and we didn’t have enough ornaments to really fill out a big tree.  But then at the last minute we saw that a lot of Christmas stuff was already 50% off at the mall.  Apparently most people get their trees right after Thanksgiving and by December 3rd, Christmas trees are already dead weight and a liability in stores.  Wow.  This was the first weekend we really even considered.That made the whole thing a lot more affordable so we decided to get a tree and some ornaments.  Because of the big Christmas sales, we actually had to drive to two Home Depots and one Lowe’s before we found the artificial tree we wanted (we knew we wanted slim, but tall).  Getting the ornaments turned out to be equally difficult.  Macy’s had a Christmas store where everything was half off at the mall, but somehow we had a difficult time getting to the mall.  We originally passed the freeway exit for it and then tried to go up a couple exits and turn around but somehow ended up going south on I-405 instead of I-5.  Oops.  I’m blaming it on the darkness, the rain, and the fact that we were talking a mile a minute.  When we finally ended up on I-5 south, we still had a couple minor wrong turns before we finally ended up at the mall.  But when we got there it was worth it to get a few more ornaments to round out our tree.

When we got home, Mike took the tree out of the box and assembled it.  Then he stood back, looked at it, and frowned.

“It doesn’t look very full.  It actually looks really scraggly.  Is that just an artificial tree thing?”

“No, no.”  I took over the work from him.  “You have to fluff out all the branches on artificial trees.  They get all squished in the box so we have to make it full again.”

I did a bunch of tree fluffing work and then started on the actual tree decoration while Mike worked on the Christmas tree timer (so that the lights would turn themselves on and off without our interference).  When we finished, we were really glad we decided to put up the tree.

Piper seems to enjoy the lights. (And the jingle bell ornaments we put on the tree.)

Mike started showering midway through my tree branch fluffing efforts, so he didn’t see the incremental progress.  When he came up the stairs after his shower, he stared at the tree in awe.

“The tree looks beautiful!!” he said.  “Good job!”

I can’t actually remember the last time he used beautiful in the same sentence as, oh, say, me.  Or other women.  Or even a car.  But oh well.  😉  How am I supposed to compete with a lighted, decorated 7-foot tall plastic tree?  I can’t actually complain, though, since I totally agreed that the tree looked beautiful.  😉

Beautiful!  Yes, that’s the right word.

It definitely made our house so much more festive!  And we realized that this is the first full-size tree we’ve ever gotten by ourselves (i.e. not counting the trees at our parents’ houses that we enjoyed and helped with but weren’t directly responsible for).  Score for one more of those adult things checked off of the list.  This has been a very mature year for me… making my first lattice crust apple pie and getting and decorating my first full-size tree.  Oh, yeah, and I guess the house purchase qualifies too.  Clearly a busy year!

In other news, I bought a pack of six stacks of disposable paper plates to give Piper her food on.  I thought they would last me forever, but the other day I reached into the cupboard and realized that I was completely out.  How did that happen?  Weird.  I had to give Piper her food in some weird colored paper bowls that I had from a long time back.  Piper looked at me like I was a little crazy.  Don’t you know these aren’t the right plates for dinner??  But fortunately for me, Piper deigned to eat off of the incorrect plates anyway.

Mike and I watched the first episode of the show ‘Veep’.  Has anyone else seen the show?  I thought it was hilarious!  I’m looking forward to watching the remaining episodes.  I literally laughed out loud multiple times during the show.  🙂

This evening we’re relaxing before what we expect to be a very busy couple of weeks, especially for Mike.

Mike and Piper relaxing in front of the Christmas tree

 

In other completely bizarre news, Piper hasn’t been feeling super well these days, but her appetite is starting to come back and she is ALL ABOUT Mike’s and my food.  I mean, she eats her food as well, but she has started to beg for Mike’s and my food which she has never done before!  I don’t know why this is, but I have a theory.  Two weeks ago Mike gave her a few pieces of the popcorn he was eating, and she’s pretty much been unstoppable with begging for our food since then.  It is bizarre!  I keep telling her ‘no!’ and directing her to her food dish, but she keeps sneaking up behind us (especially Mike) while we are eating and wiggling her head under our arm to get towards our food.

Ninja cat ready to sneak some chicken stew! (The expression on her face is priceless… STEW!!  JACKPOT!!)

 

I hope everyone’s holiday season is off to a wonderful start!  🙂

My First Trip to Autozone in Five Years

It has been raining like crazy in Seattle for about a week.  Any thought of droughts that we had during the summer has completely been obliterated.  But, of course, our little area of Fremont has kept its Seattle spirit, regardless of the torrents of rain.  On Saturday morning when I was looking out the window I saw a man with no umbrella and no hood on his coat riding down Fremont Ave on the sidewalk on a Segway in the pouring rain.  It really didn’t look like safe weather for Segways.  I mean, do they even test those things in the rain on hills?  Probably not, but the guy seemed to be maneuvering it fine, so maybe it was just my perception that Segways aren’t really rain friendly!

On Saturday night, we had some friends over for about an hour, and then we all went out to dinner.  They brought their two and a half year old son, and Piper, even though she was still recovering from a round of antibiotics, was so interested in him!  He was very gentle with animals, and we told him Piper wasn’t feeling very well.  He still wanted to go up to her and very carefully patted her on the head.  Piper, who doesn’t like being patted on the head, didn’t mind at all when he did it and she was fascinated with the way he jumped up and down on the rug and the way he crawled under the chair to sit next to her.  You could see the wheels turning in Piper’s head.  I think she thought he was half cat/half person or something.  🙂

The clutch pedal on our car started to squeak so Mike stopped by an auto parts store to get some kind of grease to lubricate it.  There was a guy with the hood of this cat open, a bunch of tools on the ground around him, who was working on his car a couple feet outside of the door.  Ah, it brought back memories of all of those Autozone trips in Michigan.  There always seemed to be someone working on their car in the Autozone parking lot.  And the aisles were set up exactly as I remembered them!  And they’re still selling boxes of those blue machinist paper towels.  And those icky smelling ‘air fresheners’ that you can hang from your review mirror (because who wouldn’t want to smell strong, chemically pine scent a foot in front of their nose while driving?).  And there was a person hogging the attention of the person at the counter who basically wanted the Autozone employee to do everything but fix their car for them.  (Actually they probably would have been fine with the employee fixing their car if he had offered… which he didn’t.  But they did ask his advice for like fifteen minutes.)  It was all just like I remembered.d  Ah, Autozone.  The memories we share.  🙂

In other news, Mike and I have been invited to one of our neighbor’s houses for Thanksgiving for a potluck.  They’re providing turkey and potatoes, and everyone else can sign up to bring things.  I’m a little excited.  What will I bring?  What will I bring??  Since I’ve been doing a lot of cooking over the summer with the CSA produce, I feel ready to take on a Thanksgiving potluck!  I was thinking about balsamic roasted brussels sprouts (because that’s about the only way Mike likes eating brussels sprouts), and maybe an apple crumble pie (strategically chosen so that I don’t have to mess with making a top pie crust.  I know I’m ready to take on the potluck world… but maybe not the top pie crust world.)

Speaking of CSA produce, I made some good stuff with this last batch.  I made a curry lentil soup from this vegan cookbook I just bought.  I would totally recommend the cookbook by the way!  The recipes all look amazing and aren’t difficult!  The woman who wrote the cookbook also writes a blog (ohsheglows.com), so check that out if you’re looking for great, tasty, easy vegan recipes!  I also made a beef stew with a bunch of the root vegetables I got.  And I rounded out my efforts with a pan of roasted vegetables (mostly beets, but I’ll try to find a different way to sell them to Mike when I offer them to him.  As soon as he hears the word ‘beet’, he pretty much shuts down.).

In other news, Mike and I got four new tires for our car.  Going into winter it seemed smart to have grippy tires, especially since our’s were getting old.

I have surprisingly been running, despite the cold, rainy, windy weather.  I’ve just been strategically picking my times so that I’m running during the warmest, driest parts of the week.  On Sunday evening I went for a hill run.  I was just mentally spent, and that is the best time to run.  I pounded up and down the same hill over and over and realized that I finished four miles of hills averaging an 8:33 min/mile.  That is fast for me, people!  I usually run hills more in the 9 – 9:30 range.  Clearly I had some stress or something to work off because I barely registered that I was running faster than usual, and I felt completely released and relaxed when I got home afterwards.

In Piper news, she has had quite a week.  A couple weeks.  About a month actually.  And so have Mike and I.  Urinary infections + two types of antibiotics + appetite-inducing pills + every other day subcutaneous fluid injections + a whole new diet == a healthy Piper.  At least so far.  Lately when people ask me what I’ve been up to, I want to say ‘taking care of my cat’.  Which sounds extreme and like I must have time for lots of other things.  But, you know, I actually don’t.  Let’s go through her current regime…. just to make sure I’m not forgetting anything.

Morning & Evening:

• Two pills – an appetite inducer (because guess who stopped eating during this whole episode?  Not that I can blame her…) and an antacid to get rid of heartburn caused by weak kidneys
• Special food to help her kidneys (usually given multiple times throughout the evening because she’s back to eating and she’s HUNGRY!)

Every other evening:

• Subcutaneous fluids (fancy vet-speak for ‘give your cat an injection and pump them with 10ml of water’) – administered by me

Once she’s feeling better:

• Subcutaneous antibiotic injections twice a day (again, administered by yours truly… I am going to be a pro at this subcutaneous business!  At least I hope so for Piper’s sake since she’s the one getting her neck ruff injected by me all the time.)

In all seriousness, though, I’m just glad that there are things I can do to help her… even though I wasn’t super excited about having to learn how to give her injections, I just love her to pieces!

In completely unrelated news, I finally ran out of space on my iPhone (all those pictures of Piper I keep taking, I think) so I went to backup my iPhone via iTunes (which I do maybe twice a year).  My phone was SO FULL that it was too full to do a backup.  Apparently a backup requires some temp space on the iPhone… which I totally didn’t have.  Also of interest, I checked how many apps were running and it was twenty.  Twenty!  How did that happen?  That’s definitely something Mike would give me a hard time about given that he doesn’t even have twenty apps on his whole phone.  However, he wasn’t home at the time so I was spared that minuscule embarrassment.

The weather here in Seattle has been crazy!!  Thirty-seven hours of consecutive rainfall, people!  And 370,000 people without power because of windstorms!  That’s a LOT of people!  At some point don’t the clouds run out of water??  And the answer to that would be a resounding YES.  After 37 hours apparently even Seattle clouds are out of water.  Not to worry, though!  The rain has (mostly) stopped.  Now we have a windstorm!  I went out to lunch with two coworkers today, and it was kind of nuts!  We nearly got blown around the sidewalk by a wet, raindrop-filled gusty wind!  I think the wind is supposed to die down tomorrow, though, so we’ll see how things go.

With all the rain, Mike and I are constantly coming and going from the house with umbrellas, and that has caused us to run out of good places to put wet umbrellas that are waiting to dry.  Since necessity is the mother of invention, I realized this evening coming home from work that we have cobbled together a solution to the problem.  I had set a small box by the back door that I was planning to break down and lacked motivation to actually break down, and that has become our bona fide umbrella holder.  And it’s disposable enough that it’s fine if it gets wet and ruined.  Does anyone else have a good ‘where do we put the wet umbrellas’ solution?  And if you have an attached garage, coming into your house through the garage and putting the umbrellas in the garage before entering the house is NOT an acceptable solution.  I mean, it clearly is for you, but we don’t have a garage (attached or otherwise).

Today on the bus coming home from work I ran into a friend from my yoga teacher training earlier in the year!  What a wonderful opportunity to do a quick catch-up with her while we rode the bus home together!

When I picked up the CSA produce today I was NOT prepared for how big the box was!  The preliminary email sent out about it said that it was a ‘holiday box’ and that it would be ‘bigger than usual’, so I took two big reusable bags to pick up the produce instead of my more usual one.  Fortunately I was able to stuff everything into the two bags, but between the giant bag of carrots, potatoes, turnips, and squash and the other bag filled with two feet tall leeks and the most giant stalk of celery I’d ever seen it was an interesting few blocks of walking home!  I was grateful that the wind had died down enough that I wasn’t getting blown off my feet (although quite frankly with all that produce as ballast I probably was better off with the produce than without it).

Is anyone else strangely taken by Seal’s new album 7?  I’m loving Daylight Saving and have listened to it a disturbing number of times since its release last week.  I love Seal’s voice and the way he infuses meaning into all of his lyrics.  Supposedly this album is very personal to him, and it really comes through to me.  Actually there has been a lot of new music I’ve been loving this fall.  Any music anyone else is loving lately?

I’m thinking I definitely want to do a Thanksgiving post this year where I just focus on things I’m thankful for.  Especially after Piper being sick, I’m ready to focus on all the wonderful blessings Mike and I have!  So if you’re in a thankful mood too, look forward to that post and/or maybe put together a list of your own.  It’s one of my favorite things to do this time of year!

Onward to the weekend!  🙂

A Teepee for a Halloween Cat

This has been a busy week or two!  Very, very busy.  Work and everything else has just been pretty crazy for both Mike and me.

I’ll start with the stuff at the top of my mind first.

I didn’t get Piper as a kitten, so I have never had any idea when her birthday might be.  I always called her my little Halloween cat since she’s all black, though, so I kind of said that her birthday was Halloween.

A month or so ago we turned one of our armchairs upside down on the floor to put felt feet on the bottom of it and Piper ran underneath the upside down chair and absolutely loved it.  She was so disappointed when we turned the chair right side up again.  This gave Mike cause to think about ‘hidey-holes’ and after some time thinking, he came to the conclusion that what Piper needed was a teepee.  I was skeptical especially when he pointed out a giant one built for a 10 year old that would never fit in our living room without being the major focal point, but Mike continued to do his research and he ended up finding a place on Etsy that custom makes pet teepees.  Mike emailed back and forth with them about getting a solid black teepee with a solid black fleece cushion inside (Piper seems to know that she’s black and she likes blending in, so she always likes hanging out/in/around black things.)  Her teepee arrived in the mail today and Mike did the minimal setup work.

Did Piper like it?

You bet she did!

 

(Mike says she looks like a Jawa from Star Wars.  I looked them up, and I think Piper is WAY cuter than Jawa.  He also says she looks like some kind of dark fairy nymph from an old fairy tale.)  Basically when Piper is in her teepee and her eyes are closed I literally cannot see her in there.  It’s Piper’s perfect hidey-hole!

Last Friday night after work Mike and I went out with some friends to Toulouse Petit.  I had heard of the restaurant before, and it was rumored to be very nice, but we had never been there.  Somehow we almost never get to Queen Anne, the neighborhood the restaurant is in.  The restaurant itself was lovely!  Dim lights and lots and lots of candles!  In fact a couple hundred tea light candles were mounted on the back wall, and they looked amazing!  I speculated on how long it might take the servers to light those each evening, but the general consensus in our group was that multiple people probably did it and it probably didn’t take that long.

We really didn’t dress up for Halloween.  I was all ready to go as a dark fairy (having bought a costume last year and never having worn it), but Mike was unsure.  And by unsure, I mean he really would rather have done almost anything in the world rather than dress up.  I suggested he could go as Steve Jobs.  That seemed like an easy costume since it’s basically a black turtleneck and jeans and Mike already has the brainy look going for him.  But Mike wasn’t into that.  Then, to compound to Mike’s uncertainty about dressing up, we were invited over to the house of some friend’s on Halloween.  I was excited to see them, but we weren’t going over for a Halloween party… we just went to hang out.  No costume required.  Or even expected.  So what I ended up doing was dressing up in my dark fairy costume Friday night (Halloween Eve) when we went out to dinner so that at least I could get a little mileage out of my costume.  I wasn’t prepared to be the only person in the restaurant who was in costume (come on people… it’s HALLOWEEN EVE!  Where are your costumes??).  What was worse is that, for practical reasons I decided not to wear the wings of my dark fairy costume (because it was cold outside and I couldn’t put on my coat if I had the wings on… funny how none of my coats accommodated wings with a three foot span) and apparently the wings “made” the costume.  Without them I was a woman in a short, black, lace-y dress and dark eye make-up.  I got complimented by two of the waiters on looking nice, but no one knew I was dressed up for Halloween.  So that whole trying to dress up for Halloween was kind of a bust.  Next time I’m wearing the wings even if I freeze.

What else has been going on?

Mike has been doing landscaping.  Lots and lots of landscaping.  Last Sunday he was outside most of the day ruthlessly rooting out weeds and laying down wood bark chips to keep the weeds from returning (or at least returning as fast).  It was basically pouring rain all day Sunday so he was working outdoors in the rain, the wind, and the dirt all day.  He did take a couple breaks to enjoy the seasonal oatmeal stout from Fremont Brewery.

Enjoying some beer while working in the rain ALL DAY! How did he not get sick??

If it had been anyone else I’m sure they would have gotten a cold, but Mike doesn’t really get colds.  I think he’s had three in the entire time I’ve known him (12ish years).  (Speaking of time going by… Mike and I will be celebrating our three-year wedding anniversary in a little over a month.  Talk about time flying!)

We also went to a garden nursery to get some new bushes for the landscaping.  I was only so-so interested, but they did have an amazing holiday section!  It was basically like a Christmas winter wonderland.

Christmas! (Who cares that it’s only early Nov?)

Mike would have liked to recruit me to work on the landscape, but I had CSA produce to cook (*whew*… lucky break!), so I stayed indoors and cooked up homemade meatballs and a giant pot of vegetable soup.  I’ve discovered that the real secret to using up CSA produce is to make everything you’re going to make with your veggies and then throw the rest in a pot, simmer it for three hours with vegetable stock and plenty of fresh chopped basil, and you’re golden.  It’s like the perfect “catch-all” plan for other vegetables you may not know what to do with.  I also roasted up a brightly colored pan of root vegetables, golden beets, red beets (which have a fancier name, but I can’t remember what it is), yams, potatoes, and carrots.  Plus plenty of thyme.  I think thyme may be the secret to taking beets to a palatable level.

 

Colorful root vegetables, including beets

 

On Halloween, as mentioned, Mike and I went to some friends’ house.  They had just bought a new home, and we got our first chance to see it.  It was beautiful and I loved the work they’d done decorating it!  Of special note: they had a pantry.  That’s right… a specific walk-in closet-ish area full of shelves for food.  Ooooooh!  Loved it!

And their pets loved Mike.  It was so cute!!

Mike… the life of the party. Also, the animal magnet apparently.

 

Possibly of interest: I’m now a sub teacher for Bala Yoga in Fremont and will be sub’ing my first class on November 29th.  I’m also a sub for a gym nearby.  How exciting!  In addition to teaching at my corporate job, it looks like I’ll have some studio experience also.

Lately Mike has also been doing touch-up painting around our house.  Piper loves it when Mike paints because he brings out his work light which emits a ton of heat.

Piper’s very own heater

 

I’m actually loving running in the cooler weather!  The days are all cool and cloudy.

Cloudy fall days…

 

Piper’s enjoying the few rays of sunshine we’re getting these days.  She’s been a little quieter and more thoughtful.  I think she’s mentally gearing up for the colder, shorter, darker days of winter.

A very pensive Piper

 

Also, if you love cats, here are some of the rarest breeds of wild cats.

A rainy, stormy Labor Day weekend in Seattle

Here we are in the middle of another week!  Only this time it’s only a four-day work week preceded by a 3-day weekend of pretty much pure relaxation.    I say ‘pretty much’ because there were a couple, actually several spider incidents which I’ll talk about in more detail later.  If you suffer from an intense fear of spiders… you’ve been warned!

On Friday a huge deluge of rain started.  And I don’t mean the typical Seattle foggy rain, where the rain is half falling, half suspended in the air around you.  No, this was the full thing.  The real deal.  The rain was falling so thick and so fast and for so many hours that Seattle was pretty much inundated.  There was also a lot of thunder and lightening, which our little furry friend was not a fan of.  And the wind was intense!  Gusts up to 50mph left lots of people without power and lots of roads clogged by downed trees and branches.  But it was kind of interesting in a we-haven’t-had-this-much-rain-all-year kind of way.  And it gave us a good excuse to just relax at home Friday night.

The rain mostly cleared up by late in the day on Saturday, so I went for a run down to the University Village area.  It was kind of crazy seeing all the branches down along the Burke Gilman trail!  They had already started the cleanup… so prompt!

On Sunday Mike and I got together with some friends and went out to a new restaurant in Seattle (named one of the 15 best restaurants of 2015 by Bon Appetit magazine).  I really liked it, and the atmosphere was amazing!  It was so small and cozy with high industrial ceilings and lots of pendant filament bulbs to light the space.  However, the portions were small, as is typical of the really high-end restaurants so we also ended up stopping at Dick’s Burgers on the way home to top off our dinner.  😉  We took the burgers back to our house and ate them there and chatted.

On Monday, Labor Day, Mike decided to make the day live up to its name, and he insisted I give him a to-do list of projects for him to get done around the house.  I obliged and listed things like the squeaky back door, the poor lighting in the basement storage area, and the dirty exterior of the kitchen window.  Mike happily threw himself into Home Depot trips, lighting research, and general home maintenance work.  I really don’t understand the things that man enjoys, but I’m really happy that the exterior kitchen windows are clean and that the back door doesn’t squeak anymore.  😉

I should probably get to the spider incidents.  I’ve procrastinated long enough.  There were three separate and distinct incidents which I will detail in chronological order.

Tuesday morning I was in the kitchen around 6am eating breakfast and I noticed a moderately sized spider spinning a web on the outside (thankfully the outside!) of our dining room window.  Since he was outside, I felt comfortable enough to get close-ish to the glass and watch him spin the web.  Although I am really not a friend of spiders, I had to admit that he looked very good at what he was doing.

Wednesday morning Mike and I were both in the dining room before work and Mike was drinking coffee when we noticed a nondescript brown bird flying around the window.  It flew closer, hovered in front of the spider sitting in the center of his newly constructed web, and grabbed and ate the spider!  Right there!  In plain view of our dining room window!   I might not be a big friend of spiders, but I’m not a fan of watching animals getting eaten alive right outside of my dining room window either!!  And what’s up with a bird doing that?  Aren’t they supposed to live on berries or something?  What is up with carnivorous birds living right outside my window?!?  I was freaked out.  Mike was somewhat freaked out, and said he’d never seen a spider get eaten like that before.

Thursday morning dawned bright and early and I noticed that another similar spider had build another similar web outside of our front sliding glass door and was sitting in the middle of it.  It was on the outside, so I was ok with it.  I might have even felt a little nervous for the spider’s sake knowing that we had carnivorous birds out there.  I ate an apple and went to drop the apple core in our compost bin.  I had this brief instant of thinking I had just seen a giant spider in the compost bin.  I was still sleepy, but that woke me up immediately and I looked harder into the compost bin.  Nope… there didn’t appear to be a spider in among the vegetable rinds and paper towels.  I probably just had spiders on the brain.  An hour later Mike had just left for work and I was getting ready to feed Piper and then leave for work myself.  I walked into the kitchen quickly and stopped dead.  A giant spider was walking down the center of the kitchen aisle towards me coming from the compost bin.  I don’t usually do the whole scream-like-crazy-when-I-see-a-spider thing, but this time I didn’t have time to think about it.  I screamed at the top of my lungs, at an octave that opera singers likely only aspire to.  I think the pure highness of the frequency rendered the spider deaf or something, because he stopped dead in his tracks and didn’t move.  I knew I better kill him quick and fast or he’d run and hide somewhere with legs that long.  Ok.  I hyperventilated only a little bit, and then managed to successfully kill the spider with a big wad of paper towel, put it in the trash, and then I took the trash out.  I missed the bus I’d been planning on taking, but some things are more important than buses.

Sunday afternoon Mike and I were sitting on the couch in front of the front window waiting and watching for some friends who were coming over.  We idly noticed the spider whose web I had noticed on Thursday morning.  He was still sitting squarely in the middle of the web.  While Mike and I watched a hornet flew near the web.  “Hey!” Mike said.  “I think that hornet is about to get caught in the spider web!”  I glanced towards the web in time to see the hornet fly even closer to the web.  And then he dove in and attacked the spider!!  I stifled a shriek and scrambled up from the couch as the spider tried to fight back.  And then, as we watched the 30-second fight-to-the-death, the hornet overpowered the spider, pulled him from the web (leaving three of the spiders legs behind on the web!!), and carried him over to a telephone line where he rested while he ate the spider!  And if that wasn’t bad enough, the hornet kept flying near the window for the next hour trying to pull the spider’s three remaining legs off of the web.  If the first incident had freaked me out, the second incident had me pretty much traumatized.  Mike, however, was fascinated.  “What are the chances?” he said.  “I’d never seen one spider eaten ever, and now I see two in one week.”  He looked at me still wide-eyed and speechless on the couch.  “You know, if this keeps up you’re actually going to start feeling sorry for spiders and liking them.”

This whole fight-to-the-death, food-chain level stuff should really be reserved for National Geographic shows.  This should not be happening right outside of my dining room and living room windows.  What do you do when there’s stuff that should require a Mature viewing rating happening right outside your window?

Suffice it to say, I’m about spider-ed out.  Fortunately word must be getting out among the resident spider population that the big windows are not the place to build webs, because I haven’t seen any new spider webs popping up there.  For someone who doesn’t like spiders, this has been quite the week.

I feel like I really need to follow this up with something non-spider related so that you don’t think everything that has happened to me this week has revolved around animals of the 8-legged variety.

So, in other news, I decided to try playing Minecraft and see what all the fuss is about with that game these days.  The default playing mode is ‘Survival’.  I wasn’t entirely sure what that was, but when I started playing I was surrounded by cows and chickens and the world seemed to be a pretty friendly place.  I ran around trying to figure out how to cut down trees and how to pick flowers.  I luckily snagged some sugar cane which I figured would come in handy later.  And then night fell.  And a bunch of crazy-looking monsters came out and the health bar I hadn’t even noticed on the screen until then went from 10 down to 0 in a couple seconds and I died.  Well, that was a short-lived type of fun.  I googled Minecraft and figured out that you have to build a shelter before the sun goes down or you get killed by the monsters.  Ah, well all right then.  I tried several more times but couldn’t get a shelter built in the ten minutes before night fell.  So then I gave up and decided to play in ‘Creative’ mode instead of ‘Survival’ mode.  I entered a similar-looking world with a bunch of cows and chickens and after a few minutes of running around and exploring, I fell into a chasm so deep that I could barely see the sky anymore when I looked up and I had no way of getting out of it.  At that point I decided that if I couldn’t even survive in creative mode, Minecraft might not be the game for me.  😉  So that’s pretty much my short-lived stint in Minecraft.  Some people are not made to game, and I think I may be one of them.

Mike has been enjoying tweaking the configurations on his new computer and has done a little bit of gaming, but none that he enjoyed as much as working around the house on Labor Day.  🙂

Have a wonderful week everyone!