Christmas Night Cruise

Last night we took the boat out for a little cruise around Lake Union.  For the first time in the 7 years we've owned the boat, we were the only boat out on the lake!  It was amazing.  It felt like we had the whole city to ourselves.  The water was glass and the air was crisp.  A cold, clear night.

We didn't send out a Christmas letter this year, so this will do it for 2009.  Merry Christmas!

Admiral Ginger

Looking across Lake Union to Capitol Hill

This is as clear as I could do on a moving boat, you can sort of see the Space Needle...

Swietenia looks great with lights, Aurora Bridge above.  Look at the wake...

Coming through the Fremont Cut.  This was about a 2 second exposure.  I need a tripod!  Again, the wake is awesome.

Starboard side, heading towards the locks (not a single other boat out, love it!)

Lola was cold.  Red lights in the boat allow you to see out when you're driving and add extreme ambience!

The Porch Progresses, slowly.

This is, in fact, the project that never ends. There is a small bit of light at the end of the tunnel, however. This past weekend included setting the stone atop the stair walls and beginning the shingling of those walls.  We had to remove the temporary steps to do that.

The floor has two coats of sealer and three coats of oil.

Getting there....still need some trim.

Walls, almost done!

Stone, mortared into place and everything!

The blue thing is our foul weather canopy, lowered for the night so it doesn't blow away.

So, looks good, right? Almost done? HAH! Now we just need to put in the real steps (tigerwood treads, painted risers), strip the old columns, replace missing trim pieces on them, varnish the ceiling, replace trim around the ceiling, find and install a porch swing, and figure out what colors we're going to use.  And oh yeah, we still don't have a railing.......

Again with the quilting.

Since this has been gifted, now I can show it to you!
For my brand new niece, Sophia, shown here giving her best impression of a grumpy gnome:

Her room is painted a lovely shade of green, so I knew I had to use that.  Plus, of course, no quilt from me would be quite right without a bit of orange, so here it is.

Front

Back

Detail of the front

And, of course, the requisite Hippo, whose name is Henrietta. Every child needs a hippo of their very own! :)

 Sophia, right before we left for the airport in the dark: yes, that snuggly fleece thing is very much too big - I think it just adds to the cuteness.

Things still blooming in October.

All right, first things first - this Agastache is INSANE. It's been blooming non-stop, attracting hummingbirds and smelling wonderful since June. June, people. It's now mid-October. That's four months. That's cool.

A different agastache here, fronted by some bright red Salvia. These were both experimentals, but I have a feeling we'll be planting more.

Next up we have the Evening Primrose. The cooler nights seem to have killed off the aphids that LOVE this plant, and in response it has started blooming again. Nice.One lone Echinacea blossom. I have a hard time deadheading these during the summer, which would cause them to bloom longer, because all the little tiny birds love the seeds. So I sacrifice blooms for food. The whole garden is pretty much like that. Plus, seedheads are interesting during the winter.
This is a Solanum of some sort - from the same family as tomatoes and deadly nightshade. It's an annual - we planted one outside the fence last year, this year we had a bunch come up, including this one, which is inside the fence in the middle of the gravel patch. It's about 4 1/2 feet tall.

Verbena rigida, still going strong. This is another one that just goes and goes and goes. Planted in a tiny triangle of dirt surrounded on all sides by concrete, it's enthusiastic and cheerful.

Pineapple Sage, another Salvia. This one isn't too hardy, and it doesn't start blooming until October, but it's gorgeous, so we put up with it.

This picture is mostly to show you that we are still working on the porch, because the fuschia came with the house, and I'm not real crazy about it. It survives, though, so who am I to dig it up?

Zinnias! I put this in to annoy Mark - he's zinnaphobic, apparently. What a poo-head.

These are just beginning to bloom, and frankly, they're a little early. Mahonia 'Winter Sun' usually starts blooming in late November at the earliest. Last year the blooms got wiped out by our ridiculous cold snap in December, so this year perhaps is compensation. Hummingbirds like this, too!

And Rosemary, because the freaking Rosemary never stops blooming around here.

The Miscanthus is just beginning to send up its seed heads, they are lovely in the sun, but on the whole, we planted too many and they got too big. Lesson learned.

Cosmos - part of our sunflower wall, they were sort of shaded out, and are just now seeing the sun.

One thing to be said for Seattle, gardening can happen all year round!

South Sound Cruise

Here are some pictures of our recent trip down south.  Six days of boat bliss (and some rain.  Ok, lots of rain...).

West Point heading south on Friday

Ginger commands the helm

I really, really love our siren.

We weren't the only ones with dreams of fresh crab this weekend...

We were pulling them in like mad in Quartermaster Harbor.  We were the show for the evening.

 Two 7-inch Dungeness.  I totally ate one of these.  Mmm!

Lola sort of hates the dinghy.

She prefers the bench seat.

Completely passed out after checking the crab pot.

Shot out the porthole window, it rained hard all night.  Yes, the boat leaks.  Good thing the wood stove is such a great dehumidifier!

We left Dockton headed for Penrose State Park - in the rain cha cha cha.

The old, and the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge.  Surreal motoring under these mammoth feats of engineering.

Arrived at Penrose State Park and they made a rainbow for us.  End to end!

Boiling the last crab for tomorrow's scrambled eggs.  

On the buoy.

Rafted to the Cinnamon Girl - a mini Chris Craft rendezvous.

That night we broke an all time record for fewest doubles drawn in chicken foot.  Or someone cheated!

HOLY CRAP, are those Vacinnium ovatum pancakes?  Others might call them Huckleberry pancakes, but not me...

Picked the day before, the sometimes 8-foot tall shrubs overhang the beach.  Easiest picking ever, no bending down, you reach up and grab.  They taste pretty much identical to Vacinnium membranaceum (that's mountain huckleberry, peeps).

Lola, extremely focused on seagulls.

And then there was glass.

Sadly, it was time to go.  Cinnamon Girl headed further south for another week of cruising and we headed back home on a nice outgoing tide.

Thanks to the moon, we made it to the locks in record time, only to wait there for, who else, but Argosy's Goodtime III!  Commercial traffic gets priority.

We ended the trip on this, a kite show at Gasworks!