Happy Thanksgiving

We are anxiously waiting for Todd to get here, driving up from Portland - to the Thanksgiving Feast. The turkey is in the oven, the rolls, stuffing, 'orange stuff', cheesecake and pecan pie are done, the house is clean, the lights on... and we are waiting. (I didn't make pumpkin pies this year, having so overdone things last year! Two desserts is enough for 3 people.)

To pass the time, I'm watching the Macy's Parade; but I'm honestly not able to get too excited about yet another appearance by Miley Cyrus (although I did enjoy the medley by the Broadway cast of White Christmas and the performance of "Nothing Like a Dame" by the South Pacific folks. The Macy's parade isn't so much a parade as it is an advertisement for the network TV shows and Broadway.) Mark, on the other hand, decided it was a perfect time to go outside and clean out the gutters. What can I say?

And so goes another Thanksgiving. I love the holiday. It's all about the company and the food - what could be better?

Hope you have a great beginning to the Holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving!

A winter change of pace

Some random 'whatevers' for the day...

Colder weather and more rain means more hanging around the house being lazy. After last week's heavy rains and flooding - and having the road closed again - we are happy to have some return to normalcy. For Maddie that means hanging out in front of the fire - and boy is she happy to have it on again!

(Incidentally, I didn't manage to vacuum before taking this picture and then noticed that the flash had highlighted some popcorn pieces on the rug... My picture processing software has a 'blemish removal' process and I used it to 'clean up.' Easy! Now I'm wishing I lived in a 'virtual' world where housekeeping was that simple and effortless.)

Outside the fall color is just about gone - this is the view from my back door. We decided not to rake leaves this year - but to chop them up with the mower and let them return from whence they came. Sort of. It seems to be working.

I tried a new technology today. Ordering pizza online. How wonderful! Who knew there were so many choices in pizza ordering?? Or that it could be so easy? (Of course we'll see if the pizza actually arrives, but I'm going to be confident.)

I'm reduced to pizza delivery because my kitchen is torn up with the counter top project. But, happily, they will be here tomorrow to install - then we just need to figure out the plumbing. I can't wait!

We got lost again

(In our defense, it was foggy. If the waterfront was there, it couldn't be seen.)

We got lost again. Lost in our own familiar city, no less. True, we were in a part of town we hadn't wandered much in before, but in Seattle, generally speaking, 'downhill' would lead to the waterfront and we were going downhill. Just downhill-north, instead of downhill-west, as it turned out. Oh well. We had no idea. We had been at the Seattle Center (think Space Needle complex) and wanted to go to the waterfront for lunch at one of our favorite seafood places, and we got lost. It shouldn't have been far, but we started out going the wrong way and by the time we realized we should already have been there, we were nowhere close at all.

(The main trouble with that sort of wandering is that you can end up in a seedy part of town without realizing it - as you are happily tripping along, holding hands and talking with each other. Mercifully, that wasn't the sort of trouble we had. We didn't really have 'trouble' as such at all. We just got lost. Temporarily.)

And so I am wondering again about being directionally challenged.

It's not that we don't each have our own internal compasses. We do. They just aren't well calibrated. In fact, in times of uncertainty our son has been known to ask us which direction we 'think' we should go and then stride off, in utter confidence, in the exact opposite direction. Now I don't know what Mark's excuse is, but I think I just got off on the wrong foot sometime in my early childhood by getting my internal directional markers set entirely wrong, but nevertheless set quite firmly. Realizing this, I am constantly fighting all evidence of actual direction in favor of attempting to correct perceived direction. If it hadn't been foggy, and I'd actually seen the sun settling in a westwardly direction, it's more likely that I'd have casually thought the sun was just taking a detour today than that I'd have realized I needed to change course. (OK, I'll be honest here too - I have never been convinced, in my heart of hearts, that the sun's path is consistently east to west. So it follows that 'where the sun is heading' has never managed to figure prominently in my estimations of direction. This is similar to the well-known psychological phenomenon about not truly believing that there is a connection between what one eats and how much one weighs. Intellectually? Certainly. Actionably? Not so much.)

I am not helped in this deficiency by general geography either. Streets shouldn't change direction. They should march purposefully forth in a straight line, the promise of delivering you exactly where you thought you'd get delivered, fulfilled. None of this curving around business and becoming something else. They shouldn't end by fading out into an alleyway or railroad track either. And the buildings surrounding them shouldn't be allowed to block all views of possible landmarks. That just makes sense...

Particularly to someone who is hungry and just a little footsore and feeling foolish for getting lost in her own town.

The ‘right’ sort of folks

I think I finally found someone to make and install my kitchen counter tops. I’m thrilled. After months of businesses not answering their phones, not following through on returning messages, going out of business suddenly, and just generally showing a lack in interest, I found a locally owned company who does their own fabrication and installation, has the product I want in stock, and gave me a really good price. What a relief. They seem to be the ‘right’ sort of folks to work with. How do I know? Well…

They came out to the house to do preliminary measurements and provide a quote. While they were there the cats came around to visit and, since we were standing around the kitchen, Maddie curled up in her sink and started to purr.

If you have been to my house you know that Maddie has her own sink in my kitchen. It is a little bar sink in the peninsula, about 12 x 12 inches square and 5 inches deep – a perfect 'tight fit' for a little girl who likes to curl up in something about her size. (OK, Maddie is well known to be a fat cat… no sniggering here, please.) She generally likes to watch water drip from the faucet but if it doesn’t happen to be dripping, she enjoys just hanging out in the sink. And so the decision to keep a second sink in the configuration was one of accommodation of the cat, rather than of any particular culinary advantage. We admit that the only one who uses that sink is the cat. And we’re OK with that. If it is important to her, it is important to us. We explained all this.

These folks understood. And I know that because this morning the woman called with some concerns. They are providing the sinks, and after looking at one in the showroom, she thought that the one we had selected might be more shallow than the one we have now.

Her concern? That the cat wouldn’t fit. Would I like to bring her in to make sure?

Icky - a lost blog post

I found an un-posted entry on the 'behind the scenes pages' of my blog. Not sure how that happened, but there it was, lurking in my archives with a red tag on it. You'd think I'd have noticed before. Loathe as I am to waste any effort or miss an opportunity to have a 'memory' link, here it is, slightly out of date and dusty, as it were:


There is a narrow silver trail running in a random pattern on my bedroom rug. I recognized how it got there immediately. I've seen those before. Somehow a slug got into the house. I know where he's been by the silvery slime left behind, but I have no idea where he thought he was going. I suspect he joined us by hitchhiking on a shoe or the towel that Mark brought in from the garage and left on the closet floor. Since I know slugs eat plants, I think he is in sorry shape in my house. There are nothing but fake ones here. (I never had a decorating dilemma that I didn't try to solve with a fake plant. Though I've been making a concerted effort to rid myself of that habit... well, I'm just not there yet.)

So.

We have cats. We don't expect much from them but I don't think I'd be out of line in thinking that one of them could at least have alerted me to the presence of a slime machine in my house, wandering aimlessly back and forth on my rug.

Yet there they are, studiously looking the other way. I don't believe they don't know it is there. But they have their 'philosophy' to stand on, in principle - don't ever go looking for trouble. If it is there, someone else will probably deal with it.