Thankful things and the pie-making process

Mike and I had a great Thanksgiving and were especially grateful for the long weekend following it!

All right.  Here we go on things I’m thankful for, in no particular order (I know some people try to make these lists in priority order or in alphabetical order or whatever, but I am really not up to that level of organization.  I actually feel pretty good about just making the list at all.  😉

Piper: As I mentioned in the last post, she’s been a sick little cat recently, which has definitely made me more affectionate and appreciative of her.  I’m also probably spoiling her a bunch now too.  *sigh*  Oh, well.  I like to think she deserves it.  😉  She’s very intuitive, affectionate when the occasion calls for it, annoyed and short-tempered when the occasion calls for it, and 100% honest about her feelings always.

Mike: Seriously, this guy is it.  He’s smart, philosophical, open-minded, honest to an absolute fault, funny, cute, very kind to all animals, thoughtful, musical, and very handy with everything mechanical and electrical.

Family: Obviously we don’t see family very often because we’re so far away, but it’s always a blessing to know that both Mike’s and my families are supportive and always available!

CSA Produce: Seriously, every year I do this CSA produce thing, I get better at it.  This year I wasn’t stumped with any of the ingredients I got and I felt like I was much less wasteful in previous years.  And it was always so refreshing to get a fresh load of produce every week.  It kept me cooking all summer long!  The CSA just ended last week, and I’m not really sure how to stay on the cooking wagon now.  Hopefully my new cookbooks will help!

New Cookbooks: I went to an author book-signing event at a cookbook store a few blocks from our house, and that was so inspiring!  I bought that cook’s cookbook and then I also bought a vegan cookbook that I am loving!  Since cooking and eating end up being every day occurrences, anything that gets me more excited about cooking is a good thing!

A New House: This time last year Mike and I were still renting and, as nice as that was, it’s nicer to have our own space that we actually own.  We are also thankful to have found a place in a neighborhood that’s really difficult to buy in.

Friends: It feels like a lot of the time that Mike and I have put in getting to know people over our five years in Seattle has really paid off in terms of a lot of good friends.  Most weekends we’re getting together with one friend or another, and we feel very grateful for that network of people to socialize with!

Jobs: Mike and I both currently have jobs that we feel satisfaction in, and we both work in pretty good teams and get along well with our coworkers.

God: I have been blessed in many ways and feel like God continues to lead Mike and me in our paths in this strange place called Earth in this strange thing called life.  I feel very fortunate in that!

Cute Dogs: It literally makes my day every time I see a cute dog.  The other day Mike and I were in a sock store (yes, the whole store is actually dedicated to selling socks… it’s really the best store ever), and I saw a guy there with two keeshonds.  I had to say ‘hi’ of course, and he even let me take a picture of them.  So sweet!  So cute!  I love dogs!  And cats.  And most other animals really.

Pot Racks: Mike put up a pot/pan rack in the kitchen shortly after we moved in, and it is the BEST!  I’ve never had one before, but now when I want a pot or a pan I literally just reach over to the rack and pull off the one I want… no more digging through cupboards trying to find the right pan which might be under five other pans.  Revolutionary to cooking, for sure!

Learning: Both Mike and I have been learning a lot at our new jobs this year, and that’s awesome.  That was really what we both switched jobs hoping to accomplish, so it’s wonderful to see that playing out.

Lots of things to be thankful for in 2015!

And now let’s talk about other things.  Specifically pie-baking kinds of things.  I actually made a pie for the Thanksgiving potluck at our neighbors, but I feel like, as with so many things I do, it was an adventure.

Let’s start with the basics.  My first thought was that I would make my Grandma’s apple pie.  Aside from being amazing, there’s something cool about bringing a third-generation recipe apple pie to a potluck, right?  I emailed my mom over the weekend asking for the recipe and I received this email back:

I’d be happy to send you Grandma’s apple pie recipe, except that she never used a recipe.  I can tell you about how I make mine, based on what she did, though.  (I don’t really have a recipe, either.  🙂 )

This is the problem with coming from a long line of excellent bakers.  No one has a recipe.  Recipes are for people who don’t know what they’re doing (like me).  My mom proceeded to give me some basic instructions which may or may not have included such phrases as “1/4 cup of flour (about, depending on how juicy the apples are….more or less)” and “a generous amount of cinnamon”.  Unfortunately those measurements mean nothing to me.  If there’s not a ‘generous’ scoop I can fill up and dump in the pie, it’s really a no-go from my perspective.  And what exactly is or isn’t a ‘juicy’ apple?  Aren’t they all kind of juicy?  Plus, my mom and grandma’s “recipe” has a top crust, which I was a little unsure about.  Bottom crusts are easier because if they crumble, worst case you can just mash them onto the bottom of the pie plate.  Top crusts actually have to stay together enough to place them across the entire top of the pie.  So I turned to the internet and found a recipe for an apple crumble pie.  I was a little iffy on it because it called for using canola oil instead of shortening or butter, but what do I know?  Maybe everyone was using canola oil these days and butter was so twentieth century.  On Tuesday I went to the grocery store and got all the ingredients for the apple crumble pie.  I was feeling pretty good about things until I talked to a friend at work who’s a great baker and who was coincidentally also making a pie for Thanksgiving.

“You’ll be fine,” he assured me.  “As long as you chill the shortening or butter before you roll up the pie crust you can’t go wrong.”  So… he and my mom both use shortening for pie crusts.  Maybe no one does use canola oil and I just had some weird rogue allrecipes.com recipe.  By the time I got home I had decided I couldn’t possibly make a pie using canola oil.  Fortunately, allrecipes.com, as if knowing my plight, sent me a ‘Thanksgiving recipes’ email that included a highly rated 4.5 star caramel apple pie.

Done.  I headed out to the store again and got the ingredients for the new pie (which included butter so I immediately felt better).  I also, fortunately remembered that I didn’t have a pie tin, so I got one of those while I was there as well.  I wasn’t sure whether or not I had a pastry cutter either, but they didn’t have any of those at the grocery store so I figured I’d make do with what I had.  After I got home I dug out my rolling pin (that I don’t think I have used in the past, oh, ten or so years) and looked for a pastry cutter.  As it turned out,  I didn’t have a pastry cutter.  I had something that looked kind of, sort of similar, but it was a microplaner for cutting herbs.  If you were ever wondering if you can replace a pastry cutter with a microplaner, you can’t.  I tried.  Enough said.

My first act towards actually making the pie crust was spilling flour on the floor.  Not a very propitious beginning, but oh well.  At this point I was committed.  I cut up my chilled butter as small as seemed reasonable and mixed up the pie crust.  It was a kind of long process.  I belatedly realized that the recipe I was using suggested pulsing the dough using a food processor (which I don’t have) so I had to make do with a fork.  When I added all the chilled liquid to the dry dough, I stared at the pathetically small pile of liquid in disbelief as I started attacking it with a fork to mix it in.  Well, that wasn’t working.  It vaguely reminded me of meatloaf.  There never seems to be enough liquid in the meatloaf either until I start mixing it with my hands.  Well, that gave me an idea and ten minutes I had a good pile of well-mixed dough and very buttery hands.  I put the dough in the fridge to chill for the day with a feeling of satisfaction.  I was going to let it chill all day and then make the pie in the evening.

That evening I realized I had made a generic pie crust recipe, which included the crust for both the top and the bottom.  I actually figured that was ok.  That way I had a ‘back-up’ crust.  If I screwed up the first one I had another set of dough on deck.  I chopped the dough in half with a knife and then took the larger of the two halves for my bottom crust.  I attacked it with the rolling pin.  And realized that it was WAY too hard to roll out!  How do people do this?  I had to basically mash the mound down into a flatter pancake before I could even start rolling it out.  Maybe it was because I chilled it all day?  However, (surprisingly?) I got something that looked remarkably like a bottom pie crust after awhile.  I had totally watched my mom often enough to know to fold the crust in half, and then lift it up over the pie plate and then unfold it and tuck it around.  Things were going really well.  Too well, really.  I was suddenly filled with doubt.  Was my crust too thick?  Is that why it rolled out without cracking or crumbling?  Because it was too thick?  Well, too late to do anything about it now.

A pie crust! Well, the bottom part at least…

Now was the time to make the ‘caramely’ stuff to pour over the apples in the pie.  Basically sugar and butter melted with a little cinnamon.  I got that started on the stove.

Now was the time to peel, core, and slice a bunch of apples.  So somehow I was really fast at peeling, coring, and slicing apples, and it felt like second nature.  Have I done this before??  I always eat apples whole and never peel them, so I’m not sure how I would know how to do this… but regardless, that part went fast.  Then I went back to my recipe.  My original plan had been to make a crumble top even though the allrecipes recipe I was using called for a lattice top.  The way I figured it, from a risk perspective, crumble tops are low risk, full pie crust tops are medium risk, and lattice tops are high risk.  However I did have a hunk of dough left over for another pie crust, and rolling out the bottom pie crust hadn’t been too bad.  What the heck.  I grabbed my floury rolling pin again, accidentally dumping a fresh cup of flour on the floor.  *Sigh* Oh well.  Time to clean up the floor and then try the top pie crust.  Halfway through rolling out the top pie crust I just decided to make it a lattice top.  Why not live a little dangerously right?

Who needs a pasty cutter when you’ve got a PIZZA CUTTER?  That thing cut through the dough like it was butter.  Actually the crust is almost entirely made out of butter so that is a really accurate simile.

 

Yeah, strips aren’t so bad

 

Now the caramel-y stuff on top. I spilled one drop of caramel topping. It sure beat the whole cup of flour I spilled.  Clearly my kitchen skills were improving towards the end.

 

Ta-da! A finished pie. Because probably no one has ever seen one and will be super excited about this picture

 

Surprisingly, the pie crust itself turned out great!  The part that didn’t turn out as great was the pie filling.  It tasted good but was too runny.  Probably my apples were too juicy or something.  Clearly I don’t have this pie thing fully figured out yet!

Thanksgiving Day was fun!  Saturday morning I prepped the brussels sprouts with the shallot and balsamic sauce I was putting over them.  Then I headed to the yoga studio where I’m now a sub teacher, because they had a bunch of their teachers participating in their special Thanksgiving Day gratitude class, and I helped perform adjustments during the class.  It was a great class!  Full of energy and full of people!  I also got to meet most of the other instructors there, which was great.  Then I got back, got cleaned up, roasted the brussels sprouts, and headed over to our neighbors’ house.  They had quite a few people over so it made for a good group.  Everyone brought good food, and I overate the cranberry sauce because it was sooo good!  But then regretted it for the next day and a half since my stomach really can’t take as much sugar as I’m sure was in there.  Fortunately my stomach felt pretty good in time for teaching yoga on Sunday morning, and that was the main thing I cared about.  After all the bustle leading up to Thanksgiving, Mike and I were both happy to just enjoy a relaxing, laid-back rest of our weekend.  Although we just started watching Man in the High Castle, a new Amazon prime show, and it is WAY intense.  We watched several episodes of that, so I guess we technically didn’t have the most relaxing possible weekend, but it was intense in a good way.  🙂

I feel like I’ve already talked a lot, so I’ll save some things to say for my next blog post, but I’ll leave you with two of the best things I saw this week… super cute-animal related, so if you can’t stand looking at cute animals you should probably skip the links.  😉  Happy Thanksgiving!

Adorable parent/baby animal pictures

Kitten meets a bunny – And why is that bunny shuffling instead of hopping?  He looks absolutely adorable, but I thought bunnies hopped??

P.S. I went through all the pictures on my phone and apparently I have no pictures of Mike or me over Thanksgiving.  Apparently my picture-taking priorities were as follows:

1. Pie-making process
2. Everything else

And I guess I never got as far as ‘everything else’.

I hope everyone else had a wonderful Thanksgiving and took significantly more pictures of friends and loved ones than I did!

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!  🙂

The holidays in Seattle!

It feels like it’s been a really long time since I’ve posted, but I think I’ve just been really busy wrapping things up at Amazon.  My last day was Friday, the 12th, and everything leading up to that felt so busy.  I had absolutely no idea how much stuff I was responsible for and maintaining until I got ready to transition it to other people.  I guess that’s what happens when you work at a company for 4+ years!  🙂

My team had a white elephant gift exchange and potluck on my last day.  It was a fun time!  I really love all these guys and will miss them as I go on to my next adventure!  I have truly worked with some great engineers and amazing people at Amazon!

A couple of my friends from Amazon!

 

After I left Amazon, Mike and I went out to celebrate our 2 year wedding anniversary.  (How did two years go by already??  I guess time flies when you’re having fun!)  🙂  We went to a gastropub called Spur.  Their tables were all booked up, so we sat at the bar which turned out to be a great decision because the bartender was really informative and helpful.  I looked Spur up later online, and as it turns out our bartender won the most imaginative bartender in Seattle award this year!  Who knew?  The atmosphere at Spur was very industrial… not quite to the point of being Steampunk, but headed in that direction.

Spur Gastropub

 

We had a really good, relaxing time!

Two years! (or 9 1/2 if we get credit for our years of dating!)

 

After Spur, I wanted to go check out the Gingerbread village.  It’s a yearly exhibit in Seattle.  Local architects partner with artists and they end up building pretty impressive gingerbread buildings (or so I had heard).  I had meant to go for the past several years, but somehow we never made it.  Mike readily agreed to go, but he was dubious as I started navigating us deeper into downtown Seattle.

“What are we looking for exactly?” he wanted to know.  “I think we’re just going to hit the Washington Convention Center and not find whatever gingerbread thing you’re looking for.”

Oh ye of little faith.  Two minutes later, we turned a corner and were right in front of the Sheraton Hotel where the exhibit was held.  Both Mike and I were surprised how many people were already there!  We had to wait in line for 20 minutes just to see the gingerbread buildings!

Lots of people wanting to see gingerbread houses!

 

When we got to the front of the line, I was so impressed!  These were much, much more than just ‘gingerbread houses’… some of these were almost ‘gingerbread cities’.  Except for the lights in the displays, everything seemed to be made of various types of candy and gingerbread.

Santa in Hawaii?

 

Gingerbread Hollywood!

 

The city of Seattle!

 

Christmasy block structure

 

After the Gingerbread Village, we did a little shopping.  Everything was so Christmasy!

Christmas shopping

 

When we got home we found a surprise had arrived in the mail from Lia… a little Christmas tree… predecorated with lights and ornaments and everything!  So beautiful!!  Of course Piper had to check it out thoroughly!

Piper investigating…

 

Apart from Christmasy stuff and finishing up stuff at work, life has just been a random assortment of small incidents, as usual.

Some examples…

I went in for a routine physical last week and got my blood drawn.  The guy who was drawing my blood was a pretty good looking guy probably 10 years younger than me.  I was trying to roll up my sweater sleeve so that he could get to my elbow, but the sweater sleeves were fairly tight and I wasn’t sure whether the sweater was rolled up far enough.  Without thinking I said, “I can take my shirt off if it helps.”  I then realized that didn’t sound exactly how I’d meant for it to sound, so I quickly added, “I mean, I have another shirt on under the sweater.  So if it helps, I can take off the sweater.”  It could have either been a really embarrassing moment or a really funny moment, but it was neither.  Apparently the guy drawing my blood didn’t have a sense of humor and didn’t even seem to realize what I’d said and just said, “Nope that won’t be necessary.  This should be fine.  Thanks for being so cooperative.”  Um… you’re welcome?  Clearly we weren’t on the same mental wavelength.  However, he let me pick the color of my band-aid after he was done drawing the blood, so it was all good.  I picked purple.  🙂  Speaking of sweaters, sweaters for penguins are really one of the best things of 2014.

One day last week while I was waiting for the bus, a MOUSE ran about a foot away from my boots and disappeared into some dense foliage near the bus stop.  He almost could have been cute if he hadn’t been a MOUSE!  Right next to my FEET!

I’ve still been running, but it hasn’t been as much lately.  I’m on a little bit of a break from running and then I’m planning to train for a marathon and run it with a friend from Amazon in June.  I ran a half marathon Thanksgiving with a few coworkers from Amazon.  It was COLD!  26 degrees!  My feet didn’t warm up until mile 11, which is pretty crazy since at that point I only had a couple miles left anyway.  It was fantastic running it with friends from work though!  I’ve never run long races with people before, but it definitely makes the miles go by more quickly!  They’re already signing up for more races, so apparently they had a good experience despite the cold!  And apparently I’ll still see them at races periodically even though we’re not coworkers anymore.  🙂

At the finish line of the Seattle half marathon!

On the few nice days we’ve been getting, I’ve been going out for short runs to enjoy the weather.

Seattle in the winter…

The scenery in and around Seattle just doesn’t ever get old to me.

Mike hasn’t been running much these days, but he’s still been working out at the gym… it’s amazing how much more frequently you work out when there’s a full gym on the first floor of your apartment building!

Mike and I are starting to get geared up for our trip to Michigan this coming weekend.  I can’t believe how quickly this trip has come!  And Christmas is the week afterwards… where has the fall gone?

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and Mike and I look forward to seeing the MI relatives soon!  🙂

Piper, Cashews, and Thanksgiving

Autumn has come to Seattle!  The weather is colder and rainier and we’ve officially retired our portable air conditioner for the winter.  Since moving off of daylight savings time, it’s also shocking how early it’s already getting dark!  By 4:30 or 5pm we’ve already lost most of our daylight.  We definitely have a long, dark winter ahead of us!  I’m torn on how I feel about that.  On one hand, I never like the idea of winter, but it’s kind of cozy getting home at night when it’s all cold and dark and rainy outside.

I also think somehow Mike and I are more social when the weather gets colder and darker because we’re less likely to just do things on our own in the evenings.  A few weekends ago we went to a friend’s house on Sunday night, and that was really fun.  (So fun that the time flew by quickly and we didn’t leave until almost midnight!)  Tonight we’re having some other friends over.  We’re planning to go out to eat in Fremont and then come back to our apartment and hang out for awhile.  I’m excited!  Piper’s probably excited too… they’re definitely cat people and she liked them the last time she met them.

In other interesting news, I am now officially an expert at giving cats pills orally.  Piper can vouch for it.  She is on a long round of antibiotics to basically make sure her UTI is completely wiped out.  I also have her on a grain-free diet (suggested by her vet as a possible way of preventing all of these UTI’s).  I don’t know about the UTI part of the diet, but she definitely has SO MUCH energy on the new food!  She used to want to play for about 30 seconds each day (a cat’s attention span is pretty short, and 30 seconds seems to be about the limit), and now she’ll play with Mike for five minutes at a time.

In other (interesting?) news, Mike and I have gotten back into watching Top Gear.  I don’t remember how it started exactly, but we’re back on a Top Gear kick (the British version with Jeremy Clarkson OF COURSE).  The episode we watched last night featured the new Maclaren P1 supercar.  All I can say is Wow!!  Its specs are amazing, particularly given that it has both an electric and a standard fuel engine.  Those episodes are so much fun to watch!

The CSA produce is sadly over for the year.  Fortunately there still seems to be a lot of good local produce in the stores, so that’s not too bad.

I’ve already done two weekends of the ten total weekends for yoga teacher training, and the teacher training definitely makes for a busy weekend!  The class is held on Friday night, and then for 8 hours on Saturday, and then 4.5 hours on Sunday.  However, I’ll only have yoga teacher training one weekend out of every three or so, so it won’t be too intense.  I love the class so far!  🙂  It’s amazing how quickly I’m already getting to know the other students in the class.  I guess when you’re essentially spending a whole weekend together, you get to talking pretty quickly!  The first weekend was focused on intro stuff, getting to know each other, talking about some of the required reading, breaking down some asanas (postures) and focusing on the anatomical implications of the postures, and some basic anatomy.  The second weekend was entirely anatomy.  It was intense, but not too bad (for me anyway), because I’d had all of that anatomy as part of the personal training curriculum so it was mostly a refresher.  We’re working through a very cool yoga anatomy book that shows all of the muscles used in each of the poses.  The full-color illustrations are so helpful for really getting a sense of which muscles are contracted and which are lengthened in each pose.  It’s been a very busy fall between yoga teacher training and work!

Also, of interest, is that Piper apparently cannot digest cashews.  We found this out the hard way.  (Most things worth learning in life are learned the hard way, I think.)  We left to go out to dinner one Sunday evening at 4:30pm.  Piper usually has dinner at 6pm, so I figured I would feed her when we got back.  However, we ended up stopping at a couple stores on our way and didn’t get home until 7:15pm.  When we opened the door, we saw that a bag of cashews that had been on the counter was now on the floor and had been chewed open.  And most of the cashews were missing.

Oh.  My.  Gosh.

Piper seemed fine, and googling ‘can cats eat cashews?’ was comforting.  Apparently there are people who feed cashews to their cats as snacks.  So all was well until I walked in the door from work the following day.  I had been on the phone with my mom telling her about Piper’s cashew theft incident and how I hoped Piper didn’t have digestive problems from it.  I looked around and there were literally piles of vomited cashews, almost entirely intact, lying in various places around the apartment (none of them on the hardwood floor, which would have made them so much easier to clean up).  After a lot of cleaning, Mike and I agreed that more cashews were not in Piper’s future.

However, last weekend we also went out to run some errands, and when we returned we found a bag of trail mix that had been on the counter on the floor and (you guessed it), chewed open.  The one nice thing was that it appeared that almost none (if any?) of the trail mix was gone.  We held our breaths and hoped that Piper hadn’t eaten any of it.  Maybe the cranberries in it had turned her off so she hadn’t wanted any of it?  The following day I got home from work, steeling myself to the possibility of cleaning up after Piper’s indiscretion.  However, I found one single vomited cashew on the carpet.  And that was it.  It was almost as if Piper had started eating the trail mix and then thought, Wait a minute… I feel like I have bad memories about this taste.  Regardless, Mike and I were thrilled that there wasn’t more of a problem.  Needless to say, Mike and I aren’t keeping anything nut-related on the counter anymore!

Since Thanksgiving is almost here, and apparently stores have decided to skip straight from Halloween to Christmas this year (as evidenced by the photo below!), Mike put up our little LED Christmas tree.

Christmas candy… already??

 

I love our little tree.  🙂

Our Christmas tree!

In case you’re wondering about the giraffe figurine at the base of the tree, he’s kind of the best thing ever.  I named him Gerard, and I really like him.  He is a year-round decoration, and is just temporarily sharing the end table with the Christmas tree.  🙂

I was telling Mike that he needed to implement some kind of timer for the lights on our tree… something to make it come on at like 6am and turn off again at 11pm or something like that, and he disagreed.

“What if you want to turn it off at 7pm but it’s on a timer?” Mike wanted to know.

I thought about it for a second.  “Can’t you implement it like cruise control on a car?” I asked.  “Like it’ll turn on if you speed up, but won’t turn off if you slow down… or something…”  I trailed off, trying to work through what seemed like a good idea in my mind but wasn’t coming out verbally very well.

Mike rolled over on his side and propped his head on his hand as he looked at me.  “And exactly how do you envision cruise control working on our Christmas tree?”

I had to admit with my explanation it was no wonder I was confusing him.  🙂

So for now we’re just manually turning the tree lights on and off.  🙂

Friday night Mike and I went to the small theater near our house and watched St. Vincent with Bill Murray.  It was a heartwarming story, although a little predictable.  I always like watching Bill Murray.  He’s such a great actor… comedic or tragic as the situation requires, but always convincing!

Mike and I are looking forward to a quiet Thanksgiving with a pre-made meal from our local PCC grocery store.  All I have to do is follow directions and re-heat an already cooked turkey and side dishes.  That sounds so stress-free to me, especially given that Thursday is the only day I have off of work!  I hope everyone else has a relaxing and wonderful Thanksgiving!  🙂

The Green Lake Gobble

I honestly don’t remember the last time I posted… hopefully it hasn’t been too long!  Today is Thanksgiving!!  And Mike and I have been enjoying a fully relaxing day.  We actually got invited to a couple friends’ houses for Thanksgiving but they were last-minute invites and we had already ordered our Thanksgiving meal from PCC.  Also we decided we just wanted to stay at home and relax.  Well, relax and work on cleaning the apartment.

This year we got a turkey breast rather than a full turkey, and that made everything SO much easier!  Instead of dealing with a bunch of thighs and other weird random bones and cartilege, we got a medium-sized turkey breast that basically consisted of a breastbone with the meat on either side.  SO easy!  The side dishes were really good too… mashed potatoes, squash, mixed vegetables, stuffing, and rolls.  Mike and I enjoyed it.  Piper is finally off of her antibiotics and is enjoying life with no antibiotic pills morning and evening.  She also enjoyed a small piece of turkey from our Thanksgiving meal.  She was initially suspicious of it, but then decided it was pretty good after all.  🙂

Over the weekend Mike and I watched Taxi Driver, which is a very old Martin Scorsese movie starring a very young Robert DeNiro.  I was surprised to see several familiar faces.  (Hello Jodi Foster!  Hello Cybil Shepard!  I have no idea what you are up to these days.)  I wasn’t entirely sure what I thought of Taxi Driver while I was watching the movie.  I still wasn’t sure what I thought of it after I had finished watching it.  And now, several days later, I’m still not sure what I think of it.  I suspect I will forget all of the details of the movie before I have time to contemplate on them and decide exactly what I think of the movie.  One overwhelming takeaway, though, is that Robert DeNiro is a great actor.  (Although that’s probably not news to anyone.)

In other news, P90X is hard.  Especially when you get into the final month.  Mike and I just had a “rest” week a week and a half ago filled with core synergistics, yoga, and kick boxing.  Although it was a rest compared to doing pull-ups and push-ups, somehow that break didn’t make it any easier to do pull-ups and push-ups during our chest and back workout this Monday.  Well, maybe the push-ups were easier.  Actually, they legitimately were easier.  The pull-ups, however, just remain very difficult.  Why is this??  Maybe I need to stop using a stool as an “aid” and just struggle with the full version until I can do it correctly??  Not sure.  But we have four and a half weeks left at this point, and we’re both tired.  Somehow that has not stopped me from playing Wii Zumba though.  There are two dances in the Zumba game that I just can’t get five stars on even though I’ve worked at it and I feel like I’m pretty good at those two dances.  Last night I asked Mike if he could watch me do them and tell me if he saw something I was doing wrong.  He watched me for a minute or two and then said, “Well, basically you’re doing every move wrong.”

I paused the game.  “What do you mean I’m doing every move wrong?”

“You asked me for feedback on what you’re doing wrong.”

“I asked for tips.  Not to be told I’m doing everything wrong.  Why don’t you come over here and do it then?”

“I can’t do those moves.  And whether or not I can do the moves is irrelevant anyway.  You wanted feedback.”

“Ok.  Well, no more feedback please.”

Mike shrugged and went back to his computer.  He clearly didn’t understand that what I was really looking for was for him to say something along the lines of “Yeah… you’re doing great.  I have no idea why you can’t get five stars on that song.  It’s probably a bug in the game.”  😉

It’s crazy how early it gets dark these days!

My bus stop after work… so dark!  See the Space Needle?  🙂

Last Saturday we were planning a nice, quiet evening (especially since we had the Green Lake Gobble race the following morning), but one of Mike’s friends from work (who is also a professional photographer and took our wedding pictures) texted Mike that he was downtown shooting a football game and wanted to know if we wanted to meet up after that.  So around 8pm we headed down to Belltown and hung out at Rocco’s Pizza.  Belltown is a funny area.  One of those places that has lots of the best places but lots of the worst places also.  And they’re only a few blocks apart.  It’s a very interesting neighborhood.  Rocco’s looked like just a small hole-in-the-wall pizza place, but as it turned out they had an extensive cocktail menu and very exotic pizzas (proscuitto with basil and roasted pear slices for instance).  Very interesting.  It was seat-yourself, so we sat at high-stooled chairs around a small table right at the front of the restaurant so we could see out into the dark street that was lit up with various restaurant and bar signs and full of people walking by.  We had a very relaxing time!  We lingered and chatted and made plans for hanging out downtown and going to some of the Christmas exhibits with him and his family.  Afterwards Mike and I drove home and watched a Hercule Poirot.  Once again I had no clue who the killer was until the end.  Poirot is definitely a clever guy!  (Either that or Agatha Christie is a clever lady.)  🙂

Sunday morning Mike and I ran the Green Lake Gobble 5k/10k.  When I woke up Sunday morning it was clear and COLD!  The ground even looked suspiciously frosty.  Hmm.  However, Mike and I put on our warm running clothes, including but not limited to the brown long-sleeved shirts we got for registering for the race.  We considered walking to the starting line (it was only a little over a mile away) and we considered taking the bus there (which would have been convenient except that bus would have let us off half a mile from the race… so it wouldn’t really be that much improved time-wise over walking.  Particularly since the bus is pretty slow and stops every block or so).  Finally we decided to drive since it was so cold.  I felt a little weird driving one mile to run a 6 mile race, but oh well.  🙂  Mike and I found a parking spot near Green Lake (which was pretty impressive given that the surrounding areas were pretty filled up with the cars of race participants already).  Mike’s back-in parallel parking job was textbook-perfect.  Good job Mike!  Then we walked to the starting line and dropped off our bag of canned food at the Union Gospel Mission donation truck on the way.  The race itself was really crowded… around 1500 participants.  That isn’t a lot for a race, but given that they were all crammed into the three miles around Green Lake, it felt like a lot.  The race itself was fun!  Neither Mike nor I got very good race times between the crowded race course and the fact that we hadn’t been doing much running lately, but Mike’s lung capacity has definitely improved since starting P90X so running felt a lot easier for him.

It has been so foggy in the mornings lately!  Walking to work has felt like walking through a misty cloud.

A lightly foggy Seattle morning

I haven’t done a whole lot of cooking lately.  I did make up some PCC beef chili.  It’s good, but it turned out a little spicier than Mike likes so he hasn’t been going through it very fast.  With Thanksgiving this week I was deliberately trying not to cook.  I didn’t want a bunch of leftovers in addition to the leftovers we’ll have from the Thanksgiving meal.

I feel like with it being Thanksgiving I’m being innundated with Black Friday sale emails. Now appears to be the time when I should buy everything (i.e. at least enough stuff to last me until next Black Friday).  I was at the Body Shop yesterday making a small purchase and the woman working at the store leaned in to speak with me conspiratorially.

“You know, this Friday we’re having a giant sale. Nine of our most popular customer products plus a black canvas tote bag for only $25 with a $30 purchase.”

I was suitably impressed.  “Nine products for twenty-five dollars?”

“Yes.  Well, you know, until we run out.”

Ah.  Yes.  Translated, that meant I could probably camp out all night in the cold on the streets of downtown Seattle outside of Pacific Place Mall along with various other crazed shoppers, homeless people and drug addicts in the hopes that I’d still be alive in the morning and be one of the first people into the Body Shop in time to arm-wrestle another woman for one of the $25 bags full of goodies.  Nope, not for me.  Despite the fact that after two months of P90X I should be in prime arm-wrestling condition, I’m just not that desperate for seaweed facial toner.

The woman at the store could tell that she was losing me… she could see it in my eyes.

“Or, you know, you could buy it at our online site.  Starting now even.”

My ears perked up again.  And sure enough, when I checked later, that deal is available right now from the comfort of my own home with the click of a mouse.  The internet has really ruined everything.  It used to be that if you wanted one of the five 80″ plasma TV’s on sale for $119 at Best Buy on Black Friday you had to set up a tent in the parking lot two days ahead of time with a stash of bottled water, ramen noodles, and stale Snickers bars.  Then at 4:30am you had to elbow everyone out of your way and knock down other shoppers to get to the item before anyone else the second the Best Buy doors opened.  And even if you successfully navigated that and beat out the hundreds of other shoppers who wanted that same TV, you had to guard your cart with your life (or at the very least a can of pepper spray) while navigating back through the crowded throngs of people to get to the cash register and actually pay for the TV because there were likely other shoppers unscrupulous enough to take your shopping cart with the TV in it while your back was turned looking at something else.  And then there was always the chance that you’d get mugged on your way to the car by some temporarily insane shopper crazed with the need for that same TV.  Really, it wasn’t until you had the TV back in your home that your breath would start to return to normal and your adrenaline levels would taper back down to normal.  And by that point you’d feel like you earned every pixel of that TV’s giant 80″ screen.  Now, there is no concept of “working” for Black Friday deals.  You can just go online and click “Add to Cart”.  The deal is yours.  I don’t know what is going to happen to this country’s work ethic now that you no longer have to knock people over to get a cheap TV.

I think I’m actually digressing pretty intensely.

Tonight Mike and I are driving to Dick’s Sporting Goods to get a couple pairs of dumbbells.  Speaking of which I have started calling Piper “Dumbbell”.  It sounds like such a derogatory name (similar to dumb bunny or dimwit perhaps?), but it’s actually just because she loves hanging out by our dumbbells so much and has no reflection on her intelligence level.  I often find her crouched next to a pair of 10’s or 15’s.  That funny cat!  🙂

Mike and I are looking forward to spending more time downtown during December… there are always Christmas lights up, and everything is so pretty and festive!  Even South Lake Union has some white Christmas lights on the trees these days.  🙂

Some white Christmas lights in South Lake Union

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Thanksgiving and has a lot to be thankful for!  Mike and I feel so blessed and thankful and have definitely been considering all the things we’re thankful for today.  Much love to all our friends and family!  🙂