Seattle By Night

Whew! What a week! We've been everywhere and back it seems like--well, except home long enough to sleep.

Wednesday we had dance class and Ri's religious ed class at her Fr. Uncle P's church, 20+ miles apart with only 30 minutes to get there. :o) Thurs. was an all day trip to Grandma's and Grandpa's in Sequim--beautiful farm country about 2 hours from here, you may have heard about it from the lavender festival. We drove around the Tacoma Narrows on the way there, so we treated ourselves to a ferry ride on our return home. The photos above are from that ride.

Corn!!

No longer just a funny saying that my friends used to scream at one another when we were in high school for blaitent attention grabbing, but also a crop i harvested from the yard today.

We planted a variety by Botanical Interests called Luscious Bicolour. The main reason why i was soooo attracted to it was for it's short harvesting date: 75 days. Lots of the corn that we see around here is more along the 90-105 day span, and we usually don't have that long here in the Pac NW with our false start summers in June that sometimes are known for creeping into the first week of July.

We did get a few ears from it--from 1 packet, we attained 3- 6 foot long rows, which yielded 5 ears for us to eat and 5 for the chickens and a few undeveloped ones.

I have to say, for all the work, i am not sure it was worth it. Might i try it another year, sure. But with the way this summer was this year, we should have been swimming in corn--the first time we planted was a summer like this one & we had twice as many rows that yielded 50+ ears of corn.

And tomatoes--oy! These are the first harvest. Things were truckin' along so good there and then Labour Day came. The cool air from the Sound at nights comes over the hill and stops the pinkish toms ripening in their tracks. I probably have enough red ones for a couple batches of pasta sauce, so Ri and i will start cracking on that this week.

Lone wayward carrot that has survived the drought we've placed on it. Hopefully there will be just a few more of these babies, but if not, at least the tops will give the chickens something good to munch on.

Most Wonderful Time

October is always an exciting month around here. I'm one of those people that drops everything for my kid (or at least i try to.) She is the best thing that happened to me since Moose. :o) And her birthday is coming up in November.

I am also one of those people that likes to go all out (with effort) when putting together a party and enjoying our special time with family and friends. And because of that, i start asking Ri what she'd like to do for her birthday around August, making the final decision in Sept. and doing a little foot work on the subject matter. Around the middle of Sept, i start dropping hints Moose's way and mentioning we act soon. By the first week of October, i usually shut down and it's all birthday planning, all day around here.

Ri would like a skating party this year for her b-day. So we spent a good part of Thursday and Friday last week designing a kickin' invite for her party. I "Google" searched some of the roller derby ads and flyers and showed her the many different styles of them. (Which meant i also had to explain that flyers with some of these things, like girls in fishnets with bun huggin' shorts on were not appropos for any age of birthday or otherwise--which she kindly replied, "I know that Mom. It's just disgusting and i would never do it.") :o) Good girl!

So with a focus on the elements we did like and a stack of tracing paper, slowly evolved this mock up of a sweet invitation you see here:

Ri is super excited! She's worried that her friends will think it's too "old fashioned", and so they won't want to come. I told her the only people who had to be excited about her invitation were her and her parents. :o) We like the sweet old schoolness of it. I was telling about how when i was a teen, people used to make these up for parties or such and hang them around the areas at school or....?

Today we are going to work on putting colour into it. This is where i really wish i knew Photoshop! :o) I need to figure out how to put a background in here, while keeping our design intact. It looks decent enough, so i think i may have missed my calling! I could have been designing promo flyers for U2 right now.....or something. :o) Then again, i wouldn't have my Nona or my Moose.

And you know it's good when after we laid out the design, Ri asked excitedly, "So, Mom, are we
going to staple these on telephone poles???"

I've taught her well...she's now officially ready to go to college. :o)

Moose is on the news

Yesterday, Moose had a public meeting regarding the potential flooding in the Valley. Here's a quick video from the local evening news with highlights of the meeting. Even an appearance by Moose at -2:14!

Enjoy! And if you are in the area, go to the meeting on Thursday 6 - 8pm at the Showare Center and get informed! Better yet, ask where you can help put your volunteer power if you are a resident that won't see any immediate flooding in your area!

Zebra Farming?

It looks like we've taken to zebra farming around here, but it's just our poor knock-knuckled Looster,

who's grown this fabulous green plummage.

And is the only chicken we have that could classify as a neon sign for hawks!

Crazy Looster.

What season is it???

Walking out in the yard today, and i discovered that the grounds don't know what season it should be.

In some parts of the yard, there are flowers that have just bloomed in that past week...

sunflowers and snapdragonsstrawberries

cherry nasturtiums

and the tomatoes! Oh, the tomatoes!

However, in other parts of the yard, it's Fall.

The mushrooms are out in full force.

Does someone have a golf club, preferable a driver, that they could lone me?

The dracs are in bloom (much to the bees delights)

The hollyhocks are going to seed

So, i decided that i would commit to a season and decorate a little.

Homegrown pumpkins at the front entry and...

homegrown corn stalks and a pumpkin on the garden gate out at the street

(lovin' that chandelier on the gate--maybe i should make a fine cotton crocheted spider web to adorn it?)

One decoration i didn't have to lift a finger for....

Maybe Hallowe'en getting closer than we'd like to believe?

Happy October!

Been Up To...

I'm sorry that the humble little blog of crafty and thrifty things i had going has been neglected lately.

Can you tell i was trying to put my focus on school, rather than computer? This week we've totally slipped because of the crud, but next week i am going to get us back on track. We have to be...soon all heck is going to break loose and come Nov 1st, our chances of having an absence of our "normal" family life is high; chances that Moose will be fully engrossed in flood issues (meaning a flood is actually going to happen) will be 1 in 3.

Thankfully, the City is going to have 2 emergency management hubs, one on each hill, so Moose has requested the West Hill EMC. Whew! So at least if he gets a shift off or even just a few measelly hours off, he can come home and help us stoke the fires since we potentially could have no power for days. :o( Personally, i think it's that the people stationed up here during the emergency are hoping secretly that i will be cooking for them. :o) And if Moose's boss suggests that many more times, i'm going to have to help make him look good. :o) Another co-worker of Moose's jokingly volunteered our 17K lot as refuge for the evacuated animals in the Valley. Ha! Wouldn't our cat love that!?! And the hawk for that matter. Oy! Scary times!

We have been distracting ourselves this week--with a few things.

Like Miss Ri's soccer. This is our little soccer star (if she could carry a book out on the field, she would.) :O) Her coach told her at last week's game that soccer players shouldn't be as polite as she is. She told us she thinks is wrong that someone should try to steal the ball from another player. Oh boy....this is why i used to tell Moose that we were going to have to send our child to public school with a book in her pants. :o)

After last week's dance class, Ri and i had a "Momma/Daughter Dinner Date", since Moose was working late at the business info meeting re: the flooding. We went to Johnny Rockets for our "annual visit". :o) And Ri was pleasently surprised to see this gent at the mall...

she loves the Tin Man, although we haven't introduced her to Mr. Baum's story yet. We have a Tin Man Christmas ornament on our tree each year that my parents purchased one year when we went to Disneyland. That evening, they were showing the original Oz on the IMAX screen (and i spent the evening blasting myself for not introducing Ri to Oz earlier.) Ironically, i had just picked up the book at the library to start reading to her during English and bedtime.

We've had this stretch of gorgeous Fall weather, so i started painting the deck. We've had "everything but" painted for a year now, it's time to get the ball rolling. We're hoping our colour scheme works out in the end...but we may just have to paint the whole thing red or black instead of both. Looking at paint sample boards from the 50's showed that these three colours did actually exist at the time, so i am hoping that it flatters the house--albeit that it makes it look more Craftsy though than Mod '59.

It really looks nice from the inside, especially when the tomatoes are looking for dreary. :o)

The red is the colour of our aluminum window frames which have the black window trim around them. The white parts of the railing will be charcoal black when we are done painting.

And while Miss is dancing her little heart out...

i've been working on a project for her and i to do. Her cousin will be turning 4, so we are going to need a present by month's end. She's a sweet little girl, always likes sharing you something that she's working on be it paper with crayons or part of her lunch. So we thought a little basket of homemade felt cookies and an apron would be a nice gift for such a girl. Ri is going to help me stitch these babies up--complete with sprinkles. I am still debating on whether we should make a few with bite marks out of them. hee hee!

Mostly though, our days involve school. And now, Ri thinks our cat is itchin' to enroll too. So most days, we have Sadie up at the table with us "monitioring our progress."

Maybe she's on to something though???

Ever heard of a cat who liked history or geography?

Maybe it's just because we are learning about Egypt now, the land of her ancestors, you know?!

Seems she is a little confused between South America and Africa though. :o)