Sunday 24 February, 2008 @ 20:20

Greetings!

It's been a good week although eventful and busy. Layoffs at work, planting cool weather crops and a big Saturday with Henry.

Work is busy and a strange vibe has been going on since the layoff notice earlier this week. A couple of all hands meetings, communications from the executive committee and lots of friends asking about my current job status. All is well as my department was largely unaffected and there really wasn't that much of a reduction in the workforce here but more of a freeze on any hiring and the news that we would not be filling many jobs that had previously been out and advertised to be filled are now off the market. Not to worry, we'll all just keep on working and do our best to contribute where we can to turn things around and return to where we intended to be all along; at the top.

I went out with friends on Friday after work and ended up drinking too much. I have to remember I'm not in "shape" to do that lately with January being dry and even since then my intake moderately quite a bit. As I thought back I still had only had about a beer and a half and one bottle of wine since Feb 1 and there I was Friday dumping lots of beer in me along with a couple large glasses of Jagermeister (which I can blame on no one but myself as I order the first round to those :). I ended up with a big head yesterday and that was what disappointed me more than anything else as I had a big day planned with Henry and there I was hungover. Ah well, I lived through it and managed to keep my illness hidden for the most part but I did take a bit of a nap before we went out last night.

Saturday began with bowling as usual and Henry's team took 4 of 4 possible league points so they did very well and all individually bowled above their averages so all 4 kids were really happy. Henry and I went to the annual bike swap and it was underwhelming and we ended up leaving without anything new or finding anything we felt we couldn't live without. The annual bike expo where all the local and national vendors will be onsite with all the latest in new gear and news is in two weeks so that will be a vastly different event. We came home and planted chard, bok choy and carrots as well as getting some flowers planted and potted my kitchen herbs before taking a bit of a rest and heading back downtown to a rock music show at a local club. It was an all ages show so it was Henry's first show where everyone stands and watches the bands in a big cavernous space and he got to experience how loud these big touring bands get in these old warehouses. The show was The Hives and opened by The Donnas and he liked it and had a good time but wasn't really ready for a headliner band that didn't start until after 10:30. We only made about 35 minutes before he asked if we could leave because he was sooo tired. I definitely understand as 3 hours of standing around on a hard concrete floor it's definitely easy to tire out. We have some other shows we'll try and take in as I am all about encouraging him to experience all the music I can get him in front of but the next few we should have seats for.

It's been a pretty lazy day, got up late and got my bread baked for the week, cleaned up a bit around the house and finished the wash so we have clean clothes for the next while and now it's time to get ready to hit the hay. I'm not looking FW to work tomorrow as I've been feeling a bit off again all day but at this point I'm attributing it to a funky schedule the past couple of nights.

Not much more on the news front so I'll bid you all adieu and I'll do my best to keep the updates coming as boring as they've been lately. With Spring I'm hoping life will get to be a bit more exciting so I should have more news around the pike...

Hasta and don't forget to subscribe :)

Tuesday 19 February 2008 @ 20:00

Greetings!

Henry and I have had a holiday weekend that is now coming to a close and I must take this moment to state out loud I DON'T WANT TO GO BACK TO WORK TOMORROW!

We've had a fun and productive weekend and the weather has been for the most part very good and conducive to getting a lot of yard work completed.

The weekend started out with henry having the day off school so he accompanied me to the office where I had a performance review with one of my accounts so I needed to be there for about an hour or so. We left the office and rode the bus up to the Pike Place Market for some lunch and a wander through the stalls just kind of sightseeing. We stocked up on some fresh spices and got a box of Market Spice tea for Henry's Mum and had a slice of pizza and some fresh mini donuts and then spent some time at Beecher's cheese watching them make some fresh curd and then wandering about in Sur La Table before wandering back uptown and onto the bus home.

Henry picked up his new bowling ball on Saturday and it is lime green and navy swirled and smells like limes. It is a weighted urethane cover and is 10#s now up from his previous 8# so between the reactive cover and weight as well as the new #s it created some challenges for him but he still bowled well and his team took 3 of 4 possible league points this week. The weather was sunny but cool so Henry walked up to have lunch with his Mum who is now working only a block or so away from the house and I trimmed my 14 rose bushes cutting them all the way back for the first time that any of my neighbors can remember in the past few years. They look a bit bare but I'm expecting them to be really great this year as I took my time and was very deliberate about how I pruned. I spent Sunday pruning my 3 plum trees and took off about 10 feet from the tops and thinned the lower branches and ended up with a completely full 60 gallon yard waste bin twice; it was emptied Monday and I filled it again today.

I have been researching Square Foot Gardening and I built a 2X6 raised bed yesterday and today filled it with a mix of 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite so essentially it's filed with high quality potting mix and this is purported to be all the nutrients that my veggies will need. Next step is to build the trellis for my peas and get those planted in the next few days as well as some other cool weather crops if I can get away with getting them in the ground now; maybe broccoli or cauliflower but I may be able to get some radicchio or lettuce in. If this works as well as I believe it will I'll build another bed to go under the big cedar tree on the North side of the house for lettuces and spinach through the summer since it stays cool and gets only a couple hours of sunlight there. I bought two artichoke plants today to go in near the SW cornere of the house where it will get serious sunshine and another over at the North end of the front yard near where my neighbors have their raspberries. Henry has been planning some planter boxes for the desk in the backyard and I've been working with him on the planning of the lumber he'll need as well as the cost; trying to bring math home and show him that you need it now and then and that it is even part of having fun projects.

After reading The Unpredjudiced Palate last year and then attending a talk by Michael Pollan the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food and I am pretty inspired now to produce and forage as much of our food as I can this summer. I'm also beginning to bake all of our bread and making everything I can from whole foods. Some interesting things have really resonated with me lately about food and here are a couple of them that I have lifted from Michael Pollan. In his research he has simplified eating to just a couple of rules:

1. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
2. If your great grandmother wouldn't have recognized something at the grocer as food, it isn't.

Pretty simple, easy to follow and make a lot of sense. I baked bread from a mother starte today and Henry has proclaimed it as the best bread he's ever eaten. I can't get him to eat whole grain bread for the life of me but this was all whole grain and he ate it right up. Using a mixed mother starter I was able to bake two loaves with only 1/2 a teaspoon of yeast yet it still has a fully developed flavor and tender crumb with a good hearty crust and a light brown almost golden color.

Henry watched Alton Brown make homemade donuts the other day so that was one of the projects we did this weekend as well, Henry made the dough, his first experience with yeast and although it was a bit challenging and a bit more difficult than most of the things he's made so far and it was a lesson in the exactitude of baking from scratch the donuts turned out mighty fine! We made cinnamon sugar on Sunday morning and Henry took most of them with his friends to the swimming pool and I made the 2nd half as powdered sugar donut holes for Henry and his friend that stayed over on Sunday night when they got up on Monday morning. Henry had his first sleepover and the kids were still awake at 2am on Monday morning and then back up at 7. I was asleep well before them and could hear them playing video games and watching TV a few times and then again when I woke up to hear them talking in the morning. I wandered through Monday with a lack of good sleep headache and the kids just went about their day as if nothing was out of the ordinary then played all day at his friends house in the creek that runs through the property and riding bikes and skateboards. Henry finally passed out about 10 last night and slept 12 hours.

Anyway, we've gotten our yard cleaned up, gotten prepped for Spring gardening and had a really good time as wwell as being able to have a couple of lazy mornings just drinking coffee and reading the paper while sitting in the sun in my big comfy reading chair so all in all it's been a great few days off and still I don't want to go back to work tomorrow.

Best

Sunday 10 February 2008; 20:50

Hi Everyone!

Here it is Sunday evening again already and almost time to hit the hay in order to get back up at 0500 for work. It's been some week, both Henry and I fighting off some sort of gombooh all week; we both stayed home on last Monday, Henry's Mum kept him home on Tuesday and then I stayed home again Thursday and Friday and still I haven't been all the way up to snuff this weekend either so it's been a pretty relaxing weekend as well. I did get out to the cinema this afternoon to see "No Country For Old Men" at the local theater and before that got Butch out for a nice walk as well when the rain broke and things dried up a bit.

Henry bowled his first 100+ game w/o bumpers yesterday and his team won two of 3 games. They went into the week in 8th place (out of 8 teams) and as much as we tell the kids they're there for fun and not really the competition it's always nice when they are in the top half of the league so they can keep their confidence up. They were doing really well yesterday after winning the 2 games though so I don't suspect there'll be too much problem with the confidence levels for the next week. We're also ordering a new heavier ball for Henry as it's time for him to start letting the ball do the work and carry through the pins. The 8 lb ball just doesn't quite do it for him.

As you can probably see I've put a couple enhancements on the blog page here; a slide show with the photos from past blog posts and also an email subscription tool so all you need to do is enter an email address and you'll receive notices when I post. I also linked Kristin's blog where she talks about her journey through her breast cancer battle and my friend's wine blog where they talk about their take on inexpensive wines they try.

Not much more going on, Valentine's Day is coming up I'm still keeping up with my far away friend. Henry is refusing to distribute class valentines but apparenly we're to take sugar cookies to school on Thursday but he can't remember how many; at least we got an advance heads up rather than at 8am on Thursday morning :)

I'll sign off for this week now and maybe we'll have some more exciting news in the upcoming weeks. We have a long weekend next week with Friday off for teacher work day Friday and then Monday and Tuesday the 18th & 19th for President's weekend in place of mid-winter break. Not a lot planned; Henry will go to the office with me on Friday and maybe we'll get some fun stuff in between pruning the plum trees and roses; ahh mid-winter garden chores - cold, wet and not at all satisfying :)

Until next week

Tuesday 5 February 2008; 1800

Greetings!

I once again missed my update over the weekend but here I am with the latest in a not very exciting week.

One of our team members moved to another team last week so we all took off at 12.30 on Friday and attended a tour of the Theo chocolate factory in the Fremont neighborhood. We had a great time and we all got to wear hair nets which always sets the mood for a group of coworkers wouldn't you say? Well, they were very free with the samples and that was the start of a weekend that really didn't include a lot of good eating habits to continue on my health regime...If you haven't had Theo chocolate or don't know about it you can visit the website to learn more about one of only 14 chocolate factories in the US and the only one that is certified fair trade and organic (the 91% chocolate from Venezuela was INCREDIBLE! Not to mention the new milk chocolate with roasted hazelnuts, mmmmm). Here is the link: http://www.theochocolate.com/.

Once we had our fill there we adjourned to a very nice bar across the street that has a beer list the likes of which I have never seen before in all my drinking days! There must have been at least 30 tap handles and the list of bottled beers added at least another 100 labels. It was a fitting place for me to fall off the wagon after my 31 day self imposed dry period. I hopped off with a lovely draught Jamaica Red Ale from the Mad River Brewing Company in Blue Lake, CA and it was yummy: http://www.madriverbrewing.com/pages/brews/jamaica_red.html. So as I said, I made it the entire month of January dry and with a little perseverance I was also able to lose 14 lbs; a full stone! Yippee for me! Now that the weekend is over and I've had a couple days of not really worrying about it, I need to get back on the healthy lifestyle regime. My short term goal is 10 lbs per month so I'm ahead of the game going into month 2. The long term goal is 30 lbs for the year but I would like to take off about 60 lbs overall. I'm still having some trouble with the disc in my neck so lifting is out for the time being but I'm trying to be a bit more disciplined about getting some walking in and I can always go to the gym to use the treadmill on rainy days so I should be able to kick start this again and maybe even lose another stone in February but anything over 6 lbs lost will be gravy. Once Henry and I start training for the summer riding season as the weather gets nicer it should be even better and I won't have so much weight to pedal around either.

Henry was invited at the last minute to a birthday party Friday in downtown Seattle and he suffered from that the next morning during bowling. He has not quite figured out the lack of bumpers and although the first week of league he averaged a 74, he dropped down to about a 45 average for this past weekend. Ah well, it will pump his handicap up for this next week and his team can use that because they are all pretty skilled and thus have relatively low handicaps which doesn't help when it comes to league stats. They lost each of their 3 games this last week by less than 5 pins (handicapped). He still seems to be enjoying it so that's the main thing.

I signed Henry and I up for this year's Tour de Cure to take place May 17th so we have almost 3.5 months for fundraising. Henry has committed to us riding the 45 mile loop this year so this time around we need to do a bit more training and kill those butt nerves. I worked a table at our company mingle this morning and we had a good turnout with almost 40 people signing up for more info and we're hoping we'll get some good participation out of this. Greg LeMond is scheduled to once again lead the ride and I hope we can get Henry up to meet him this year since he had to cancel last year due to a family emergency. I'll update with the personal web page links here next week after I get this year's built.

Not much more going on other than Henry and I both fighting off the flu/colds that seem to be going around. We stayed pretty quiet on Sunday and then stayed home both of us feeling pretty poorly yesterday but we're better now. I'll sign off now and see if I can find some more ultra exciting news again for you all next week to keep you on the edges of your seats...

Hasta