Post coming soon

I'm putting together a tribute to the Gulf Coast and Keys right now. I spent a fair amount of time in the areas that are now being affected by the spill while I was a graduate student. Many of the communities were just hanging on before, and this spill will devastate not only the environment down there, which is very fragile, but also the livelihoods of a good portion of the population.

We can rebuild her...

We have the technology....Better than she was before. Better, stronger, faster.

Ladies and gentlemen, Frankenbike has returned from her exile to the shop. Today's new parts include new gear cables, and a whole new flywheel and cassette. But she works like a charm.

The fair and more gardening.

After a long but successful week of staring at spreadsheets (next week I actually get to go work in the lab), I was ready for some weekend fun. On the docket for this weekend was a trip to the Shepherds extravaganza at the Puyallup Spring Fair. Despite being filthy with knitters, crocheters, spinners, and weavers (I'm not kidding, I am NEVER the only person knitting on a bus. Last week someone was spinning on a drop spindle ON THE BUS) there aren't any big wool or yarn markets in Washington. I find this a little odd. The closest things we have are the yarn marketplace at Madrona (I haven't gone yet) and the Shepherds Extravaganza at the spring fair. I wanted some new spinning fiber, and maybe even a raw fleece so off I went to the fair, accompanied by my friend Grace, who is always down for an adventure.

It was very fun, but I have to say, the whole place was.....smaller....than I expected. Good, but smaller. We saw angora goats.

They were less blurry in real life. The midway was in full swing. We decided not to ride anything, though it appeared that's what most other people were there for.

They were setting up for the demolition derby later, and we saw the cars go by.


There was a sustainability section, on how to make your house and yard better for the environment (definitely in the Pacific Northwest when they are advertising the next Rodeo adjacent to the sustainability tent). There were Pygmy goats (a whole show of them in fact).

And also miniature horses (but I don't have any pictures of them). And Dancing Horses.

And that was it. Like I said, really good, I had a lot of fun, but small, the whole place only took a couple hours to wander. There was more we could have stayed for, the pig races for instance, but we decided to head home. The haul:

That's two bags of alpaca, one big bag of romney, and one bag of angora/softwool. The three bags of white fiber I'm going to dye with mushrooms after they are spun up this summer.

Sunday was our regular Farmers market/clean house/house projects day. And Alli came over for dinner. Of note, we worked in the garden (I'm liking the garden). We moved the remainder of our big pile of dirt out of the driveway and into the backyard. And then we planted.


We've added a third bed, and we planted 4 kinds of tomatoes in it yesterday. I also planted some radishes. The plants have been loving the weather.



And so has the cat. She's spent most of her time rolling around on the pavement in the back soaking up sun.

Just like all the humans (well except for the rolling on the pavement part).

The Brain Train Derails

For those of you who've had the pleasure of speaking with me in the last two weeks, and wondered why I seem a little shell shocked and suffer from what I like to call "word synaesthesia" (I speak but what I say makes no sense because I replace random words in sentences with other words that don't fit)...This is a screen shot of what I have been dealing with for 8-10 hours a day...I figured it would explain better than I could.



That's right. Multicolor, 100K row spreadsheets. It would drive anyone mad.

Springtime in the great Northwest

That's right, spring is here. This weekend has been sunny and warm(ish). This has led to every person in Seattle going outside to try to rack up some much needed vitamin d. So, what have Russell and I been up to now that we finally get to experience seasons again? Well, yesterday we celebrated the wonderful weather by.......spending the day inside. This was not because we were hiding from the sun like some kind of mole people, but rather, we had agreed to help judge a beer competition. The competition in question was the regional finals for the National Homebrew competition. Judging took place at the Pyramid brewery downtown, so there we headed at 8:00am to help out. Here's a hint. When you have to judge beers at 8:30 am, be sure to have a good breakfast, and volunteer to judge porters or stouts. There is actually such a thing as a breakfast stout, and more importantly, both of them have "coffee character" which takes the edge off.

For anyone skeptical about the possibility of drinking beer at 8:30am, you're not really downing a bunch of beers, you're sampling and then grading them against a set of standards (like in a dog show), and each sample is about an ounce. It's surprisingly actual work as opposed to just drinking.

Judging went on all day, and in the evening we went to a friends birthday. Busy busy.

Today we got our "enjoy the outside day" with the rest of Seattle. YES! First thing in the morning: bake scones and make lemon curd for breakfast. Delicious!


Next proceed to the farmers market. We go every week, but now that the weather has been improving its even more exciting. THERE ARE NON-ROOT VEGETABLES AGAIN, YAY! Today's haul included early salad mix, wild watercress and knotweed, some pasture raised ground beef, chicken wings, eggs and this:

That's a goose egg. We're going to poach it and put it in salad tonight.

Spring being here also means gardening season. We asked our landlord if we could put in a few raised beds, and he was totally game. So Russell built some, we had some dirt delivered, and today we planted planted planted.




Planted are peas, onions, shallots, spinach, lettuce, mustard greens, mizuna, turnips, thyme, and some random flower seeds.

That was the weekend. Sadly its back to the grind at work tomorrow. Hopefully Frankenbike will come back from the shop in a few days so I can get back to riding (She's having her spring tune up).

Summary

Wow, its been too long away from the blog. I've been a busy little bee so I thought I'd present a little photo essay of what I've been up to for the month of March.

Russell and I tried to go snowshoeing in the cascades, but there was no snow so it turned out to be just a hike. A beautiful day though.





I did some weaving and successfully finished a project. Behold the MacGregor Tartan Scarf.


We went on another hike. This time up around Chuckanut. The view over the water was excellent.

And I found a great mushroom! (Great as in interesting, not great as in tasty).


It finally snowed again in the Cascades, so I got one more ski trip with my dad. We skied Ammabilis Mountain. The view near the top.


Russell, Al, Grace, and I went Razor clamming out at Copalis/Moclips beach (I didn't have my camera so these photos are shamelessly stolen from Al and Russell). We all four dug our limit of 15 clams and proceeded to feast on them the next day.






Somewhere in there I went to a conference that went really well, and I continue to work too much at my post doc, but no pictures are necessary for those. They mostly involve staring at a computer screen for too long (which is why I don't blog enough, by the time I've gotten home, I'm all screened out).

Given that spring seems to be here, I expect some more adventures shortly.

Posting soon with pictures,

I promise.

Life has kind of exploded over here. I've been frantically getting ready for a conference. But also taking some time to have some fun (on weekends) so I'll give a triple weekend update soon. Probably Friday.