Birthday weekend with Heather!

Being a twin is the best thing ever.  For me, it has meant having one of the smartest, funnest, most talented girls I know in my life since the very beginning.  I was about to say that she's one of my best friends, but that's not quite right -- the bond we have is better, deeper than that; it's the best of family and friendship all in one.  For the first eighteen or so years of our lives, we shared our birthday celebrations.  Then we left home, went to college, and have generally lived in different parts of the country ever since.  But this year I moved closer to Heather, and Heather's kids were old enough to be left behind for a weekend, so Heather flew out to Seattle for a few days and we got to celebrate together.  Fun, fun!

Heather arrived Thursday night.  I picked her up after work and we went to eat at Tamarind Tree, my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in Seattle.  Heather, who is not the most adventurous eater in the world -- especially when it comes to fish -- was very brave and tried a handful of dishes, despite the fact that they all used fish sauce!

My favorite moment of the dinner: "Wait, there's no silverware?!"

I took the day off on Friday so that we could play.  We got up early and went out for a breakfast of tacos.  Because who doesn't want to eat tacos for breakfast?  Only along the way we got distracted at the neighboring rug store and ended up buying a rug instead.

One of those miraculous moments when the store had exactly the thing that I'd had in mind.
I bought it on the spot. 

Once the (very large) rug was loaded into my (very tiny) car, we returned to our original task of tacos for breakfast.  The weather was lovely, so we got them to go and ate them on my rooftop deck, using an overturned flower pot as a table.

Chorizo verde with radish, cilantro, onion and lime. Quite possibly the perfect taco.

That afternoon, we headed downtown for a food tour of the Pike Place Market.  The rendezvous point was in a theater covered by the so-called "Gum Wall."  According to our guide, the Gum Wall originated when folks started sticking gum and coins to the wall while waiting to get into the theater.  Not surprisingly, opportunists stole the coins and the building owners tried to scrape away the gum, but it kept coming back.  Finally the owners gave up and the wall became a slightly disgusting tourist destination.

We were careful not to actually touch the wall.

Next stop:  Doughnuts!  Because fried dough is always delicious, especially when it's covered with a light dusting of cinnamon and sugar and is still warm.

 
Then came the fishmongers.  We sampled a variety of cured salmon and watched them throw fish to each other, much to the delight of the shoppers.

Moving from fish to other types of meat, we stopped at the butcher's shop to sample some tasty sausages and freeze for a minute in the walk-in meat locker that felt like it was waiting for a horror movie soundtrack.  

Heather didn't get any because she had declared herself a vegetarian in order to avoid
needing to eat any fish.  So they gave her a fresh pickle instead.  She loved it.

Next stop was Beecher's Cheese, where we saw the giant vats and the delicious cheese that is made in them.  Their macaroni and cheese is out of this world.

We stopped at a bunch of other places along the way -- a tea shop, a produce vendor with incredible fruit, a deli that serves gourmet sandwiches and sold retro sodas, a chowder house that claims to sell the best New England clam chowder in the country (and has a track record of winning chowder contests that would seem to back up that claim) -- and finally we ended up on a bench under a tree eating fresh crab cakes and looking out over the Puget Sound.

We borrowed the guide's pink umbrella to shade us for the photo.

As soon as the food tour group broke, we headed over to Pioneer Square for another tour -- this time through a network of subterranean tunnels that is a vestige of Seattle's crazy history.  The gist?  Well, here goes:  The original settlers founded Seattle on the shores of the Puget Sound, in a location that was flooded twice a day by high tide.  Instead of moving the city, they just stayed and dealt with the mud and muck -- and by "muck" I mean sewage reflux caused by the rushing of tidal waters up the sewer pipes and out the toilets in people's homes.

Eventually there was a fire that burned the entire city to the ground, only instead of using that catastrophe as an opportunity to move the city to a more pleasant location, the city decided to stay where it was and raise the ground above sea level by filling in with rocks and dirt from nearby hills and sawdust from the mills (because everyone knows that sawdust is a super smart thing to build your city on).  The merchants weren't happy, though, because they didn't want to wait for the regrading project to be finished before they rebuilt their shops.  So they rebuilt at the original ground level while the city proceeded to raise the streets.  The result was a grid of downtown roads that were anywhere between 5 and 30 feet higher than the level of the sidewalks and shop entrances.  People literally had to climb up and down ladders to cross the street and to get into the stores.  A pain for the men (especially if they were drunk), and a real hassle for the women who still had to wear skirts.

Once the regrading of the streets was complete, the city covered over the lower sidewalks with new raised sidewalks -- thus the original street-level doors and windows of the buildings became basements, and the upper stories were now street-level.  At first folks thought that they'd just keep the now-covered sidewalks in use, but then they realized that they live in Seattle where the winter nights are super long and dark, and for some reason burning torches in enclosed subterranean tunnels with wooden buildings all around seemed like a terrible idea.  So after a short while of bumbling around in the dark, they closed the tunnels and thereby allowed all sorts of vermin (human and otherwise) to flourish beneath the city.

Eventually the city was tired of all the murders and prostitution and drug rings that were going on down there, so it condemned the tunnels and they became a dumping ground for debris over the years.  Finally, in the 1960s, some enterprising historian crawled back down and thought it would be a great idea to open up the tunnels for public tours -- which is where we are today.  The tour was super interesting and weird and made me realize just how crazy the process of building a city from scratch is.

On Saturday we ended up doing house-related things.  I had originally planned to do more touristy things, but there were a number of projects that needed doing, and Heather said she was game to help out.

We tried out a few samples of paint color that I'd been meaning to try.  The painter had called to say that he was going to start earlier than expected, so finalizing the paint selection was top priority.

Painting Portland in the guest bedroom.  We went with the lighter shade.

And we tested the rug in the living room.  It worked great, but we tried a couple other rugs, too, from a different shop in the neighborhood, just to make sure that I wasn't missing out on other potentially good options.  It was super helpful to have a second person to move the furniture around!

 
When we got hungry, we swung by Dick's Drive-In for an old-school hamburger experience.

The rest of the day blurs together now, as I try to remember it -- I know we ran a lot of errands and saw a lot of furniture.  In another walk-by moment of serendipity, we passed a storefront downtown featuring a couch very similar to one I'd been eyeing at another store.  We went in to look at the couch, but Heather spotted a bed that was perfect for the guest bedroom.  So we picked out some upholstery and placed the order.

On Sunday morning we went to church and then stopped by one of the best viewpoints in Seattle on the way home.

This is the best view ever, with the city and the Puget Sound.
If I move again within Seattle, I'm going to try to get this view.

After taking in the views, we went home, changed into our rain gear and went down to the ferry docks to catch a ferry over to Bainbridge Island.  The weather was grim and wet, but we still had fun.   The ferry affords wonderful views of the city and neighboring islands, and Bainbridge is a lovely little community.

Hoods and views don't always go together!

By the time we got to the island the light was already fading into the early winter evening.  We drove around and saw as much as we could before night fell, and then we found a spot for dinner while we waited for the ferry home.

Burger with poblano peppers and salsa

That brought us to the end of our weekend together.  We got home and watched a few shows on tv and went to bed.  In the morning (the morning of our actual birthday), Heather flew home and I went back to work.  What a great birthday weekend!

Another Halloween win for Ashley

The nice part about having a sister who's an evil genius for costumes?  She's there for you when you when you need to win at Halloween.  

At first I was excited when my friend Dana invited me to her annual "Epic Halloween Party".  For the first time in, like, forever I thought I would finally be able to dress up for Halloween instead of working late and going to bed early.  Only then I panicked -- what do I wear!  Everyone at this party is going to be smart and witty and artsy, and they'll all have the best costumes ever!

Then I called Ashley.  "Ashley," I said, "I need all your best costume ideas.  It needs to be awesome and witty and easy to put together and is it too much to ask that it also make me look hot?"  And in response, the woman who gave us The Mummy, the iPod person, Flo, and Cruella DeVille, called back with no fewer than 20 fantastic ideas and careful instructions for each.

My two favorites were at the top of her list:

Get a rubber chicken, an electrical cord and a blue shirt.  Tie it all together and, voila, "Chicken Cordon Bleu"!

Put on a stereotypically French outfit -- nautical stripes, beret, scarf -- and then paint your face like Gene Simmons.  You're a "French Kiss"!

I picked the Chicken Cordon Bleu costume because it was the easiest to pull together.  But I regretted passing on the French Kiss -- it's such a great idea -- until my friend Brad told me he didn't have a costume and would be going to the party in plainclothes.  I peer pressured him into trying the French Kiss costume ("Please, you'll be the most popular person at the party." "But I don't want to be popular." "That's ridiculous, of course you do.")  I lent him my nautical stripes and he found the rest.

"French Kiss" and "Chicken Cordon Bleu"

We were both a huge hit at the party.  Everyone loved the costumes, and it was a great way to talk to people -- either they would start cracking up from across the room as they figured out the pun, or they'd come up and ask, and I'd walk them through the elements:  Chicken. Cord. On blue.

Ashley, start brainstorming for next year!

The Hike: Autumn color in the Enchantment Lakes

The last time I went on an overnight backpacking trip was, gosh, probably sometime during the year or so after I got my Eagle Scout award.  So, early high school, roughly 20 years ago.  Since then I've hiked, and I've camped, but both together?  Not until this last weekend.

On Wednesday my friend Colin asked if I wanted to go backpacking with him and his friend Corinne in the Enchantment Lakes over the weekend.  The Enchantments, he said, were among the most spectacular nature destinations in the state of Washington, well worth the trip at any time during the year, but especially now.  The high glacier lakes are surrounded by groves of larches that turn bright gold in autumn and transform the place into a magical wonderland.

Although my non-spontaneous self would have preferred more than two days' notice, I decided to give it a go.  I mean, what's the point of living here if I'm not willing to run off with only four hours of sleep into the rainy Cascade mountains to climb sheer rock faces and camp in the cold?  Between generous friends and a trip to the rental counter at REI, I managed to cobble together enough gear lined up to avoid dying of exposure on the mountainside.  And when 5:30am rolled around on Saturday morning, I was ready to go.

We took two cars so that we could do a "through" hike, meaning that we could hike the full 18-mile trail that ran from one side of the mountains up over Aasgard Pass, through the Enchantments, and down through the Snow Lakes to a different trailhead.  No need to retrace our steps with a simple out-and-back itinerary.

I wouldn't say this was an easy hike.  Aasgard Pass was insanely steep, and 18 miles of hiking -- steep or not -- is going to leave your feet and back and knees feeling a little worse for wear, especially if you're using a borrowed pack that doesn't fit so well.  And the weather wasn't exactly cooperative, either.  Saturday was cold and rainy, with a persistently blustering wind that burrowed right into sweaty clothes every time we stopped.  It took us quite a while to find a decent campsite amidst the snow and the rocks and muddy lakeside marshes.

But oh! -- the scenery!  Breathtakingly beautiful and otherworldly.  The sort of thing in the nature that makes fairy tales and fantasy seem plausible.  I'll let the photos do the rest of the talking:

The few from the top of Aasgard Pass

The snowy, rocky terrain atop the pass was not encouraging.

But soon we started seeing hints of the golden larches.

The sun broke for a fleeting moment and lit the trees most gloriously.

Most of the trees were slightly past their prime,
but there were a few standouts left.

After much searching, we found a suitable campsite next to Leprechaun Lake.
We pitched the tents, ate a quick and chilly dinner, and went to bed with the sun.

Morning dawned brighter than the day before, but still blustery.
Colin and Corinne seemed to think that photos were unnecessary.

While my companions slept late, I wandered around the lake, soaking in the peaceful beauty.

Leaving the Enchantments basin, descending towards the Snow Lakes
on our long hike back to civilization.

Mountain goat!

Cascading waterfalls were everywhere. We were never out of earshot of roaring water.
Maybe that's why they're called the Cascade Mountains.

This was a pretty neat shot.  The mist you see is a thick cloud bank that sat on the edge of the
lake and most of the way down the mountain.  The last five miles or so was a misty,
mysterious world.

The trail ended in an oddly deforested section, with scars of an old forest fire brutally visible.

The House: Moving Day!

Finally, at long last, and FOR PETE'S SAKE, I moved into my new place today!  I technically have another month before I need to be out of my old place, and I had hoped to paint and redo some light fixtures (and maybe trim some more moss?) before moving in, but apparently Lesson No. 1 in the New Homeowner's Manual is called "Resign Yourself to Everything Taking 87 Times Longer than You Think It Should and Just Move In Already."

The move couldn't have gone more smoothly.  I had everything packed and ready to go (most of it having never been unpacked from the initial move from DC), and the movers were prompt and quick.   Seattle demographics being what they are, there was no rapping this time; instead, I was entertained to overhear the three three twenty-something white guys wondering aloud how one of their mutual friends could not want to be a P.E. teacher.  They surveyed the pros ("everyone wants to be a P.E. teacher") and cons ("the higher ups" "you mean principals?" "yeah, they're total hardasses") and still came out in favor.  Part of me envied what seemed to be a simpler world than the one I inhabit.

The movers left around 1pm, and I spent the rest of the day unpacking and organizing, with a brief interruption when the Comcast tech came to set up the Internet (seamless Internet transition -- way to go Comcast!).  He was a character, too.  Mighty grumbly about Comcast as an employer (he's quitting soon to become an apprentice crane operator) but also super competent and even volunteered to recode the visit as a different type of service so that I wouldn't be charged for it.  

After he left, I spent several hours in organization heaven (a.k.a. The Container Store) working on custom plans for my master closet -- and although I'm so excited about it I thought seriously about pulling an all-nighter to get it installed, I decided to go to bed anyway.  

So no closets and moving pictures tonight.  Just this one:

Because even though the house is a mess and full of boxes and packing tape, that's no excuse not to have fresh flowers.