Roof!

Walls!

We have walls!  It's starting to look like a real house!

  

Foundation!

The amazing disappearing house!

The house remodel/addition is finally underway!  I'm planning to post photos periodically so you guys can see the progress.  Here are some before photos (the last one was taken after the trees were removed):

And here’s what the place looked like yesterday (3 weeks after signing the contracts):

The grading should be done soon and then we'll get a foundation!

Floor Plan

I’ve been meaning to start posting on my blog again, but I haven’t had anything interesting to say for a while.  Once we start the remodel I can post photos of the progress, but for now you’ll have to settle for looking at the floor plan. 

It seems like every time we talk to the architect he thinks that we’ll apply for permits in two weeks (it’s just like in The Money Pit!), so hopefully I'll have some updates soon!

R.I.P.

Gus Linnehan AKA “Little Mouse”

Born: December 23, 2010 in Brickway A Lower Level, Mark Young’s bottom desk drawer

Died: December 18, 2012 at his home in Sebastopol, CA

Gus was the sole survivor of his litter and lived a long (for a mouse) and pampered life with my parents until his recent illness.  His interests included running on his wheel, exploring their house under controlled conditions, and rearranging shredded toilet paper.  He maintained a lifelong (and carefully monitored) friendship with his three cat housemates.

My building at work has been having mouse problems since early November, with at least a dozen sightings and soiled desks. One guy that didn't even have food in his desk found a nest made out of his papers with babies in it and put them outside, even though he knew they were too young to survive. Most people (including me) didn't know they could get into the closed metal file cabinets at our desks and found out the hard way. When I got back from Thanksgiving, I found droppings and chewed up items in all 3 drawers, and a mouse in the top one, but it took off as soon as I opened the drawer. There were other sightings after that, but I figured that by the time the week-long holiday shut down rolled around Facilities had gotten a handle on things.

On Monday morning when we got back one of the guys found that the energy bars in his desk had been nibbled on, everything had been soiled, and some of his papers had been told to bits and pulled through a small hole in the back of the bottom drawer of his cabinet. Between the back of the drawer and the back of the cabinet he found a nest with 5 baby mice. They were about 11 days old, they didn't have their eyes open yet, but they did have fur. I didn't want them to get put outside like the last ones and Facilities was planning to give them to the exterminator, anyway, so I took them. The web said that the survival rates would be low, but I figured it was better than a guaranteed death with the exterminator. I made a quick run to Walmart for kitten milk replacement formula (ironically, that's what the web recommends feeding baby mice) and started feeding them every 1.5 hours, including at night. I brought them home that evening, and Mom started taking care of them while I was at work. On Wednesday night four of them died within an hour or so of each other, but the fifth one opened his eyes that night and is getting bigger and stronger every day. My plan was to release any that survived into the wild once they were weaned, but I read that the hand-raised ones wouldn't know what to eat and would have lost their fear of things coming from overhead (and that fear helps protect them from predators). So now I intend to keep him (his lifespan is only expected to be about a year), and move him to building right behind our place, where our washer and dryer are. There's a small storage room with a window and if he's in there in a cage he should be safe from the cat. I think he's a boy, but I don't know for sure. I haven't come up with a name for him yet, I just call him Little Mouse.

Sam at Sunset

It was a really warm, fog-free fall evening and Sam decided to survey his territory while I worked in the garden.



Considering we had a long, wet winter, no spring, and a cool summer, my veggies did okay this year. I've made fresh salsa for the last 3 weekends with our tomatoes, and we have lots of squash and basil. Unfortunately there wasn't enough extra to justify doing any canning. It's a little sad, but a bit of a relief, to start pulling out the plants that are done producing. Now I can plan for the winter garden!

In the Garden

Ever wonder what carrots do all day under the ground? I do now...

Baby Showers

I'm helping to host two baby showers next weekend, so I spent a good chunk of the day wrapping gifts and prizes with Mom and preparing the shower games. This is the result of our efforts:

Sophia

Here are some of my favorite things about Sophie (April 2006 - January 2010), I wish we had had more time with her:

1) the kink in her tail

2) the way she squeaked instead of meowing

3) what a great hunter she was (Patrick saw her catch a hummingbird!)

4) when I would reach down to pet her she would stand up and grab my hand with her paws

5) how much she loved to eat and roll in the dirt (and how when I made this observation to Mom she agreed, and added that she had never seen a cat more like her owner)

6) how much she adored Patrick, and vice-versa

I sure miss my sweet little cat.

On the left, being naughty.

On the right, watching Sam attack the thing under the cushion making scratchy noises (my hand)

On the right, worn out from playing.

On the right, giving Sam a hug.

Being naughty again.

Posing beautifully.

Plants, porn, pizza, and pi

I should warn you that for the last few weeks I have been (and continue to be) absolutely obsessed with the coming gardening season. I got a little wild this year and spent $12 on vegetable seeds. Previous years I bought almost all my vegetable plants, but the seeds are more economical, and I just get so excited about the whole process from buying to planting to watching them sprout that I don't even think of the extra work as being "work". And this way I can share with Mom and she won't have to buy many either (we'll both need to buy tomatoes). Here's what I planted last weekend and early last week:

16 spinach

32 carrots

8 pumpkin

32 sunflowers

8 cantaloupe

24 corn

16 bell peppers

8 crookneck squash

8 zucchini

8 lemon cucumber

3 regular cucumber

16 basil

48 peas

That's a total of 226 seeds! I may have gone a little overboard, but I'm planning to lose about half (they won't germinate, or the bugs will eat them, or they won't survive transplanting), and give half to Mom. That still leaves 56 plants for me. Yikes. I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to raise that many plants previous years, but Patrick is going to install drip irrigation so I won't have to spend an hour watering every night. I'm getting excited just thinking about it. And do you know what I saw today? The very first one is starting to push the dirt away! I'm not at all surprised it's a sunflower (big seed and fast-growing plant). In the next two weeks the rest should pop up, one by one, and I'll drive Patrick and Mom crazy with the daily status updates.

You're probably wondering about why "pornography" is in the title of this post. Well, I figured pornography is so prevalent on the internet that I should post some, too, so here it is:

I was in the garden last weekend, minding my own business, when I saw these two. Yes, that's my patch of oregano they're leaving. And yes, that larger one is the female. She seemed... unfazed... by his attentions.

Moving on...

In celebration of Pi Day, we had a dinner party and served pizza pies and an apple pie. I took a picture of our dry-run pizza from last weekend. We made the crust and sauce from scratch, so I was very proud, even if it doesn't quite look like what you would get in a restaurant:

The actual event yesterday involved 3 pizzas, and each crust turned out slightly different, even though they should have been identical. All in all, the food turned out well. I'm definitely getting better at rolling out dough for pie crusts, it ends up mostly in one piece now. I just need more practice...more delicious practice...

Cannibal Scrabble

I'm addicted to Cannibal Scrabble. I don't really like traditional Scrabble, but I play Cannibal Scrabble every day at lunch in the cafeteria if I have time. Here's how you play: Take all the Scrabble tiles, except the blank ones, and place them in the center, facedown. Players take turns flipping over a tile, going clockwise. If you see a Scrabble-legal word (so no proper names) that's at least 3 letters long, call it out first and you get to take it and place it in front of you, and then you flip the next letter. Words can be stolen (you can steal your own words or other people's) by adding letters to them, but you have to change the root - so "dog" can become "gods", but not "dogs" - and you have to use all the letters from the word being stolen. Once all the letters are flipped over and everyone agrees they don't see any more words, you total up the point values on the letters of your words, and the one with the most points wins. It took quite a while to get to the point where I would actually have a respectable number of words at the end, but now I'm hooked.

Dry January

I know, I said I would keep up on my blog, and then I let it go.
I finally joined facebook, but since the website is blocked at work, and I don't have a computer at home (I take my work laptop home on weekends), it's hard to keep up to date with all the messages. I can (and do) blog at work, so it's easier for me.

The holidays were great. Lots of presents, lots of good food, family, everything you could want. We had my parents over for a breakfast of Swedish Pancakes (traditional in Patrick's family) and then opened presents. I've heard that Christmas is better when you have kids around, but it's hard to imagine a kid could be more excited than I am in a room full of presents.

We had Christmas dinner with my family next door, and my aunt and uncle, their daughter and son-in-law, and their two boys. The youngest one was less than a month old, and the older one, Ryan, is a little over two years old. The grown-ups were all playing 31 (as is traditional in our family) and I was knocked out of the first card game early, so I started playing with Ryan. I ended up skipping the next two games and spent a couple of hours building tunnels of couch cushions for him to knock down. That kid wore me out. Make tunnel! Make tunnel! But we had a good time.

For New Year's Eve we went to dinner in Occidental at a new pub there (Barley and Hops Tavern), and were in bed by 10:30. I had brunch with some of the neighbors the next day, while Patrick went to work for an hour or two.

The weather here has been very unusually warm and dry this month, so I've been spending a lot more time working outside than I usually would in January. The days are still quite short, and the sun is very low, so the portion of the day when it's warm in the yard is smaller than it will be in spring. I've finished at least half of the pruning I should do this winter, so I'm in good shape there. I'm motivated by wanting to impress a couple of Patrick's aunts that may come visit this year, and it's easier to do since we're living there now (last winter we spent at his place in town).

Cross stitch

I've been doing cross stitch since college, when Rachel helped me complete my first project, a snowman wall hanging from a kit. That project took two days total to stitch and assemble.


Then I started a scene with killer whales, also from a kit, which took about 5 years, give or take. It took so long mostly because I would spend months (or years) not working on it all. Once I finally finished the whales they became a gift to my mom.


In 2005 the whales were followed by butterflies on a background of flowers, still in progress. It's my first project that is not a kit, so I had to buy all the individual colors I needed, including several colors of "Glissen Gloss" thread that I couldn't find in a store and ended up ordering online. They give the butterflies a wonderful shimmer, but they fray very easily and I can guarantee you that they are frustrating enough to work with that my next project will use only normal thread. I made a lot of progress on the butterflies in the last 3 months before I left LA, since I had shipped almost all worldly possessions to the garage at my parents place. I had no bed, no chairs, no TV. My realtor left a small camp chair at my place for her to use during open houses, and I sat there and did cross stitch most evenings. I also worked on the butterflies when I first moved back to Nor Cal, until I adopted the kittens, and I became concerned that the moving thread would be too tempting for them. And then Patrick came along, and I spent most of my extra time with him. Now, after some encouragement from Mom, I've started working on it again, while he's watching a football or hockey game in the evening I can sit on the couch with him and stitch. I'd like to document my progress on this blog to encourage myself to keep working, so here it is, as of 12/23:

There are 4 butterflies total, the cross stitch is done on the bottom one and most of the second, but you can hardly tell where the 3rd is going to be, and the fourth hasn't even been started. I realized this past week that one of my colors of Glissen Gloss is going to run out before I can even finish the butterfly I'm working on. When it does I plan to leave gaps and move on to the other colors until I can tell for sure what I need to order to complete the project. Once the cross stitch part is done, I have to go back and do the backstitching, and it seems like there's a lot of it on this project.

Ice Cream Cake Mess

In response to my last post, Rachel sent me the link to a webpage with beautiful, intricately decorated desserts: http://bakerella.blogspot.com/. It inspired me to make a cake for Mom's birthday last week. I didn't want to do a frosted cake with two layers and filling, so I tried to make an ice cream cake. It turned out reasonably well, other than a little bit of the melted vanilla ice cream making its way through the frosting. And in case you're wondering, that dark splotch is a butterfly made of cake crumbs (I copied the idea of using crumbs as decoration from some cupcakes in the Williams-Sonoma catalog):





The whole thing tasted fine, but it lacked the sophisticated, professional appearance I was going for. In case anyone else is thinking about making one, I'll share my technique and some lessons learned.
1) I started with a box of chocolate cake mix and made a single 9" cake (I used the excess batter to make some back-up cupcakes in case things went really wrong).
2) I cooled the cake on the counter, then in fridge, then the freezer. My first tip for success would be to not try to do make the whole ice cream cake in one night, because I think completely freezing the cake would have made things easier.
3) Once the cake was reasonably cool, I cut off the top to make it level (my cakes are always shaped like little volcanoes), set it on the platter (in my case it was a dinner plate) and put my 9" springform pan wall around it.
4) I had thawed some ice cream on the counter (next time I'll thaw it in the fridge to make it a more uniform consistency, not frozen in the middle and liquid on the outside). I used a spatula to spread the ice cream over the cake, making a layer about as thick as the cake portion. I put it in the freezer for a while to resolidify.
5) In the meantime I made some whipped cream (whipping cream + powdered sugar + a few minutes with my wonderful stand mixer). I removed the springform wall from the cake and started frosting and decorating it. This is where things went wrong. I knew it was extremely important to keep it cold, but I was having fun with the decorating and I was running out of time, and before I knew it I had little runnels of ice cream breaking through the whipped cream. Looking back I really should have paused between the frosting and the decorating and put it back in the freezer for a while.

Okay, I've wasted enough time at work, my boss said we should leave by noon (since it's Christmas Eve).

Merry Christmas!

"Do you prefer flowers or chocolate?"

I prefer flowers made of chocolate...

My favorite entries in R's blog are about desserts, so I'm going to steal her idea and post some photos of the most attractive desserts I've consumed recently.

At my work's holiday party in November they had several kinds of desserts, but the most beautiful (and tastiest) by far were the tulips: white and dark chocolate petals, chocolate mousse filling, and little dark chocolate spheres sprinkled on top.



Last week when I got to work this box of chocolates was sitting on my desk, a Christmas gift from my boss's boss, made by his wife. She makes candy as a hobby (although she's considering starting her own business) and periodically her husband brings in samples for us to try. I think he's trying to get us hooked...



...it's working...

Thanksgiving

So, it's probably time for a second post ... but I wouldn't want to rush into anything.

Just before the first post I was in Denver for Thanksgiving (with P's family), and I had a great (and slightly chilly) time. I got to see prarie dogs and snow, two things we don't have in Sebastopol. Technically, we do get snow on the ground every 20-30 years, but I was living in LA for the only time it's happened in my lifetime.

Day 1 (Wednesday): We left the house at 3am, just after I realized that we were flying out of San Francisco, not Oakland. I had been telling everyone the wrong airport, including P! We started off the visit to Colorado with our traditional feast at Chipotle. It's P's favorite restaurant and there aren't any within about an hour drive of home, so we make up for it when we travel. After that we visited the Columbine Memorial and walked around the lake, watching the prarie dogs and chatting (it was the four of us: P, me, and P's parents). We stayed with them in Littleton for the first two nights of the trip.

Day 2 (Thursday) : We drove to Boulder on Thanksgiving Day for some sightseeing and dinner at P's aunt's house. She has a beautiful house right up against the foothills with tons of windows and a great view of the city lights at night. There was a lot of delicous food and conversation with relatives, but since I'm not including the names or photos of people at this point, there's not much else I can say about it.

Day 3 (Friday): The day after Thanksgiving we took the long way through the mountains to P's aunt's cabin in Eldora. Lunch was at Beau Jo's pizza in Idaho Falls, very tasty "mountain style" pizza. Then we stopped in Central City to gamble for a an hour or so (I put $1 in a penny slot machine - I bet one penny at a time - and left with $2.75, a 175% return on my investment!). The photo below is of pretty much the whole town, the casino we went to was one of the old-fashioned, multi-story buildings straight ahead.

It started snowing as we got closer to the cabin, not too hard, mostly the wind was just stirring things up.

Day 4 (Saturday): In the morning it was really windy and snowy (notice the tree with all the branches on one side and the covered rental car).

We flew out later that day, and, although I had fun when I was there, the constant action wore me out and I was glad to be home and very glad we had Sunday to recover before returning to work. We left home at 3am Wednesday and got back at about 1:30am Sunday, so the whole trip took just under 4 days!

Seven years in four paragraphs

I don't have an account on myspace, I still don't know how to text, but after years of enjoying other people's blogs I finally have my own! I was fascinated by my grandmother's Depression-era journal that I read recently, and I'm hoping that although my life may not seem very exciting now, maybe it will in the future. Also, I have so many people from Tech that I would like to keep in touch with, but I never write to them, regardless of how many times I make it a New Year's resolution to keep in touch. I'm thinking that general posts may be easier than multiple individual emails. And I love reading the blogs of people I went to school with, especially my former roommate R who always has great posts on delicious-looking desserts, and the ones with kids now, like Eeep, L&M, K&D, and J&C.

Here's an update of what I've been doing since I finished college: I worked for Boeing in LA for 4+ years, eventually moving to Culver City after I was laid off and rehired by a different part of Boeing. In early 2006 I sold my condo, moved back to rural Nor Cal where I was born and raised, and bought my grandparent's place from my parents. It's ~4 acres with a 50-year-old house that my grandpa built himself, plus half a dozen other structures (barns, etc) that are in varying states of disrepair. The plan is to build a new place on the property in a few years, the actually date will be depend on how the housing and stock markets behave. Shortly after moving to the country, I adopted two kittens, a brother and sister, both black and white, named Sam and Sophie. They're grown now, but they'll continue to be my only babies for a few years until we build a place suitable for less furry children.

I left Boeing on a Friday and started working for Medtronic the next Monday, first in Supplier Quality, and now as a Design Assurance Engineer. My first week at MDT I didn't know anyone in the cafeteria, so I sat next to a couple guys who looked like they would be friendly (it didn't hurt that the younger one was quite good looking). It turned out that the older one was the manager of the younger one, Patrick. After 6 months of me flirting shamelessly, P finally asked me out and we've been together ever since. We got married in Vegas in January of this year, so we've almost been married a year. It's been a busy one: we had receptions in Denver and Sebastopol in April (one for each side of the family), finally moved in together in May, and my sister got married and had a baby this year. I still haven't seen my new nephew, since they're currently living in the UK with her husband's family, but they're planning to move to Eugene next summer, so I should get to see the little guy then. I also acquired a brother-in-law and a niece when I married, but they're in North Carolina, so I don't get to see them much, either!

So, that's what's been going on in my life for the last few years. I'll try to keep this up with regular posts, hopefully I'll be better about posting than emailing!