Northwest Notes

Garden photos

2008-05-27T21:01:29Z

The kousa dogwood's flowers look especially creamy and parchment-like this year.

Ice plant and artemisia:

Helianthemum:

Honeywort (bluish green) looks great with this yellow-green euphorbia (but looked more vibrant last week):

Oxalis (clover):

A photo from the Utah trip

2008-05-23T02:05:38Z

Marching Men, originally uploaded by Fran Mason.

Just figured out how to blog a Flickr photo straight from Flickr, so here's a vacation snapshot.

I loved this long drive through the scenic roads. We hardly got on the Interstates at all. We saw some big ranches and a lot of "empty" country full of hills, sage, pinyon pine, mines, dry salt lake beds, and rocks. We were at well over 4,000 feet elevation the entire time we were in Utah and Nevada. The sky was so blue!

We stopped to eat at several mom and pop restaurants. The Ranch House Diner in Snowville, Utah; Big Moe's Restaurant in Price, Utah; the Golden Stake in Moab; Top's City Cafe in Delta, Utah; the International Cafe and the Toiyabe Cafe in Austin, Nevada; and the Most Likely Cafe in Likely, California.

Price, Utah, was an interesting place. Flat country, huge open sky, wide streets and sunshine, friendly people in Big Moe's. Price is located at the foot of a high plateau (as is the town of Helper--look at this cool picture of it). We had been driving a long time on the top without knowing how far we were going to drop. We got out of the car on a small road up high, and walked onto a ranch to admire a tiny creek in the silent air. Occasionally a bird would sing. The sky was royal blue in the thin air. Then the road plunged down past some cliffs, below the ranch, into mining country. A lot of people in Price work in the mines, the cafe waitress told me.

Utah vacation

2008-05-23T01:32:36Z

We spent almost two weeks driving to Canyonlands and back. I put some pictures and details on Flickr.

Our basement is getting an octopusectomy

2008-05-23T00:51:08Z

In a couple of weeks, an asbestos crew and a furnace company are coming to replace our old coal-burning furnace. For a decade or two it's been attached to an oil burner, but when we moved here the coal bin was still in the basement, right under a window. (No coal was left behind, though.) We have lived in this house for ten years so it's about time we got a new furnace. It will still use oil, but only a small amount compared to what this has been using. It almost makes me look forward to next winter.

Yardbirds

2008-04-23T20:14:58Z

I spotted an unusual and beautiful bird in the yard the other day and watched while it explored the fountain rim, the flowerbed, the patio, the wheelbarrow, and another flowerbed, then flew up into a big shrub. When I found it in the bird book, it turned out I'd seen it before. I'd made notations in the book of seeing it six and seven years ago almost to the day. It's a mid-to-late-April yardbird. The yellow-rumped (Audubon's) warbler. (Cornell Ornithology Lab photo) Today I was weeding and heard a woodpecker's drilling sound. I often see flickers but they seem to go tap-tap-tap instead of really drilling like other woodpeckers. I followed the sound and saw a downy woodpecker going at the top of the utility pole next door. I think it was a female because I didn't see the red patch on the head. (Wikipedia photo)

Cherry blossoms and bleeding hearts

2008-04-14T20:40:32Z

Two of my favorite spring blooms are here. If only they lasted all summer!

Blue Fountain bamboo is flowering

2008-04-06T01:34:05Z

I've read that after a grove of bamboo flowers, it dies. I discovered today that our "grove" (small clump) of Blue Fountain bamboo is flowering. And it does look like it's dying. The green leaves in the picture are on a different bamboo right next to it, arrow bamboo.

The Indianapolis Zoo has a short article about their blue fountain bamboo:

"In the space of just a few years, every specimen of blue fountain bamboo will flower and most likely die. This is the first time this species has flowered since seed was brought from China to Europe in about 1886.

"Bamboo is known to exhibit gregarious flowering. All individuals of a species flower at about the same time. Reports of flowering of blue fountain bamboo began several years ago and are likely to continue for several more years. Individual plants flower for several months, perhaps even for a second year.

"Based on the history of this plant - seed was sent to Europe about 1886, flowering began in the 1990s - we can expect blue fountain bamboo to flower next in about 2100."

Scooter, snowmobile, what's the diff

2008-03-28T21:05:40Z

It was dry at 8:00 this morning when I left home. I worked with a personal training client until 10:00 in the gym and then it was raining, so I decided to stick around and work out on my own and see if it would stop raining. This stretched into two hours somehow (clean shrugs, pressing and deadlifting all require rest in between sets, that's how). I got all my scooter gear on, opened the door and it was snowing. But not sticking.

The gym is close to the ship canal, not much above sea level. Getting to our neighborhood takes me down about five miles of streets that stick pretty close to the water, until the last two miles, when I head straight up a long slow incline. The higher we got the more snow was sticking to the grass and a little bit on the street.

The roads were mainly just wet, but my helmet visor was accumulating snow on the outside and fogging on the inside. I had to ride with it half open, which caused the snowflakes to feel like tiny blades at 35 mph. I took some slow side streets and finally made it home.

Rufous hummingbird

2008-03-26T17:11:19Z

We've seen the green-backed Anna's hummingbird at our feeder all last summer and all this winter, but this morning I was out there and saw a rufous for the first time. The linked article says their wings make a buzzy sound, which I heard. It was intermittent like a cricket, but it stopped when he sat in the tree above the feeder. The article also says they're territorial and very aggressive, so maybe there's a battle in the offing. This Wikipedia article has some really good pictures.

I completed the "first draft" of my fountain a couple of weeks ago.

I rescued (transplanted) a tall, gangly viburnum 'Dawn' from the top of the back slope where it was hidden by a ceanothus (Calif. lilac) that had grown much faster. I put the viburnum in the other end of this little flowerbed where the fountain is. I need to get a picture of it. It's about eight feet tall and was quite a wrestling match to dig up and carry down to its new spot, but it looks happy there already. It needed staking because it's so tall.

I have tried two trees in this same bed. The first one, a redbud, turned yellow and died. The second one, a Japanese stewartia, struggled (possibly too much sun and not enough water) and now I've moved it to a new spot to see if it can recover with less direct beating sun--or whether it's dead. The viburnum 'Dawn,' though, I've had great luck with. I have four in various good and bad locations, and the only difference water and sun seem to make is in how fast they grow. This is my favorite plant of all time.

Kettlebell class starts March 24

2008-03-01T05:56:31Z

I'm offering a beginners' kettlebell class at CrossFit Seattle starting March 24. Here's a flyer for the kettlebell class.

The current series is going really well. A few people who don't like to exercise are saying they like the class, and they're working really hard. This is lots of fun for me!

Leveling

2008-02-25T23:03:36Z

I got out the tamper, paverbase gravel, shovel, and level today for two projects. I want to put a fountain (in a pot) in the small flowerbed by the patio. Experiments with building a funny-looking sculpture with leftover pavers has shown me that non-level structures look terrible, so I dug under where I want to put the fountain and replaced the soil with paverbase. I tamped it, put a paver on top, and made sure it was level. I won't fill the soil back in until I get the pot and everything else and make sure it's still level.

Then I rebuilt my "sculpture" on a leveled base as well, using a cantilevered design this time.

You can see the neighbors' new fence in the background. We liked it so much we had the same people build the same fence on our north side, along my Woodchipstrip.

Guitars and wildlife

2008-02-15T00:50:10Z

Last night in the guitar class we learned the Allman Bros.' "Melissa." That's a fun song to strum and our teacher pointed out it's really easy to solo over, so we all had to try that. There are four or five of us in the class on any given night and so far everybody agrees it's more fun than private lessons. I was so glad when this was offered because I still miss the Old Town School in Chicago and its group classes.

On the way home last night at 9:30 PM I was waiting at the light at Boren and James--this is right outside the heart of downtown--and a coyote crossed the intersection. I'd heard they are in Seattle and it's not too unusual for them to be spotted, but I'd never seen one in town and was especially surprised to see him in that totally paved, cold, urban setting. He looked perky but I felt sad for him having to run around on the concrete.

Obama won big in our precinct

2008-02-10T01:28:19Z

Our caucus was held in a 100-year-old school building, in a square classroom covered in student art and chalkboards. Several old sofas, tables and folding chairs, plus the banged-up, varnished cedar floor, provided places to sit. It was standing room only but it was comfortable. We saw three neighbors we recognized plus one member of my book club who lives nearby.

Our neighborhood is an historically black area that has gone to about 60 percent white in the past ten to 15 years, and of the 88 people in our precinct caucus room, there were maybe 10 black people. We didn't specifically count. What surprised me was that the room went 85 percent for Obama, with 75 votes for him, 12 for Hillary, and one undecided who later swung to Obama's side. I had thought it would be closer and that there would be more undecided voters.

The New Yorker magazine had written about the Iowa caucuses. The story gave me the impression that there would be aggressive recruiting from the two sides, with people trying to persuade the others to come over to their side. Our caucus had none of that. One person was spontaneously chosen from each side to speak in favor of their choice for sixty seconds. After each side spoke, the one undecided voter identified herself and changed her vote.

Votes had been counted by a couple sitting next to me on the sofa. They had collected the sign-in sheets on which each person had written their choice, tallied the votes (two or three times, though no one else doublechecked their count), and then handed the sheet back to the woman who wanted to change her vote.

Luckily there were more than enough volunteers to be delegates and alternates to the next levels, the district and county conventions. Our precinct assigned five delegates--four to Obama and one to Hillary. Tom and I didn't volunteer, though we would have if there hadn't been enough people who wanted to do it. Once that was over, we left.

Can't fix the blog?

2008-02-05T05:29:38Z

Well... This is one of the default styles. If I want Northwest Notes to look the way it used to, I will have to figure out the css and so on. But at least now I can blog! I was starting to go into the D.T.'s with no blogging. Even though I was routinely going a month with no entries.

I wanted to get FitNotes fixed first, because I'm now a professional fitness trainer, having made this official last week by leaving my day job at the law firm as a technical writer/helpdesk. I've been training people for almost a year and a half and now I'm ecstatic to immerse myself in it. My first major offering, my six-week kettlebell class, is full. I also have some private kettlebell training clients. This is exciting! Not a good time for one's websites to vanish.

What happened with the blogs was that I installed Movable Type 4.1, saw that my styles were wiped out, got frustrated over several days and deleted my blogs. I did a clean install for the second time. I still can't get FitNotes working right because it's a subdomain--at least I think that's the reason. I could only apply a stylesheet by hard-coding, because the StyleCatcher could not find the "real" css it was referring to. A second problem is that the comments aren't working--you can see the existing comment but there is no interface to type one in. Also the Search path is no good. That one's definitely related to the subdomain arrangement. But Northwest Notes works because it's the actual domain.

I think I'm going to delete the FitNotes blog again (currently at fitnotes.net/blog), delete everything related to it, and start over on that blog, either by (1) reinstalling MT into a subdomain path, or (2) by purchasing fitnotes.net as a separate domain instead of a subdomain.