Christmas Time is Here?

Yesterday I walked into my building downtown to find that Christmas has arrived.

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Garlands and poinsettias are everywhere!

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There are 10-12 "regular-sized" Christmas trees; they vary between about 8 feet tall and 12 feet tall.

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And let's not forget the 2 giant two-story tall Christmas trees that decorate the elevator lobby! It seems to me to be a little early for all this Christmas decor; after all it's still before Thanksgiving, and Advent doesn't even start until this coming Sunday. But somehow all the festivity still makes me smile!

Harvest

Last week our CSA share included several heads of romanesco. For those of you who don't know, romanesco is related to cauliflower. It looks pretty similar to cauliflower, except that it's green and spiky. We had some last night with dinner, and it was pretty good.

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Our garden is pretty much done for the year. We had a fairly good year. We started out with strawberries, which produced very well, and blueberries which did okay. We planted raspberry vines this year, but didn't get any berries. We harvested tomatoes pretty much constantly from mid summer through September. We also had a few small beets, a few jalapenos, and a plethora of basil. The lettuce didn't really work out, as it bolted before we got around to eating it! We never got around to pulling up the carrots, or onions, but neither had looked very promising.

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David went out yesterday to pull up the dead plants and do a general clean up of the garden for the winter, and look what he found:

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Our lone onion, and the carrot gang

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These intertwined carrots look like a heart!

Halloween

David and I decided to dress up this year for Halloween. I was Miss America, and David was a mechanic. We managed to create our costumes entirely out of things that we already owned. (Okay I made my sash out of plotter scraps, but since that's recycling I think it still counts.) My only disappointment was that I couldn't find my tiara. I'm sure that I have one somewhere; I'll probably find it sometime this week, now that it's too late!

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Sunny San Diego

Last weekend I went down to San Diego to take the Professional Engineer Examination. The test was long (8 hours on Friday, then 5 hours on Saturday), uncomfortable (plastic folding chairs), and overall was an experience that I hope I never have to do again. But once I made it through the test, I got to hang out with my brother Robby who happens to live in San Diego.

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That's Robby at his house, playing guitar.

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And here's Shannon, Robby's girlfriend.
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Robby and Shannon live at the end of a road that ends because that's where the ocean begins. On Sunday we walked down the cliffs near their house to the Ocean Beach Pier (which you can see in the background of most of the pictures from that walk. Robby says that it's the longest pier on the west coast.)

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Me and Robby, trying not to be blinded by the sun.

.Shannon and Robby, walking near the tide pools.
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A tide pool. I think that I was trying to get a picture of a crab that was hiding between the rocks.
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The ocean.

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Me, splashing barefoot in the water. (Yes, I'm wearing only a t-shirt, no sweater. No, I wasn't cold. It was a lovely break from the rain in Portland.)

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On my trip back to Portland I saw the oddest thing in the San Diego Airport.
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An area in the San Diego Airport, filled with rocking chairs.

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(Oh yeah, one last thing: I won't get the results of my test for 13 weeks, so I can relax until then.)

Big Blue Bone

Sprocket has a variety of toys. Some of them squeak (I did not buy these ones), and some of them have room to hide treats within. But my favorite is Sprocket's big blue bone.

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I think it looks like it should belong to a cartoon dog.
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Sprocket

Yesterday we added a new member to our family at Fiske Cottage.

Meet Sprocket.

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Sprocket comes to us from the Oregon Humane Society. He is a Labrador mix, and is very happy to be joining our home.

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So far Sprocket's favorite activities are following David and I around, and sniffing everything!

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He is 3 months old, and already 25 pounds. He's going to be a big boy!

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Portland Aerial Tram

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Yesterday I went on a tour of the Portland Aerial Tram with the Structural Engineers Association of Oregon (SEAO) Young Members Forum.

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The tram has been open for over 2 years, but this was my first time riding it.

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It makes an average of 170 trips each day, transporting 4,000 people.

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The elevation change from the base station to the upper terminal is 500 ft; the horizontal distance is 3,300 ft.

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In normal conditions the tram travel speed is 22mph, making the trip about 3 minutes.
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The tram project used 1,250 tons of steel and 450 tons of concrete to build.

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The haul cable, which is what makes the tram move, goes through the big wheels, seen above, and connects to the 27 ton counterweight located below the upper terminal.

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The track cables are anchored at both ends. They are not easily adjustable, so the cables are able to sag slightly on hot days, and are more taut on cold days.

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The lower terminal houses the mechanical equipment, which consists of the main drive engine as well as 2 back up drives.
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5 Pairs of Shoes

I realized today that I have 5 pairs of shoes in my cubicle.

Does that mean I'm at work too much?

Atomic Vegetables

Look what we got in our farm box this week:

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Torpedo Onions

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Tomatoes from our garden.

Sock Summit

Last weekend we went to Sock Summit. It was a whole convention just about knitting socks. Lacy and I were going to try to sign up for a class, but all the classes filled up within hours of online registration starting. So we contented ourselves with attending the marketplace, which was full of yarn, knitting needles, and basically any knitting accessory that you can imagine. We both brought our husbands along, to entertain each other and keep track of Mary so that we could focus on the yarn!

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Brianne with a whole-lotta yarn.

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More yarn.

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Lacy, Mary and Brianne.

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David was good-natured enough to pose with yarn.

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Heat Wave

You can tell that it's hot when the leading headline on a news website is about the weather. I think that my favorite line in the article is:

The heat is expected to dip to 100 by Thursday.

Mahjong

Last week we went over to our neighbor's house for dinner and a round of mahjong. Mahjong is a fairly long game (four rounds, each having a minimum of four hands), so we've been playing a round every few weeks, with the hope of finishing the game sometime this summer.

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Marty and David enjoying pizza before the game.

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We played round 2 (south wind). When we started the round I was in 4th place, and David was in 3rd.

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Brianne and Kristine mid-hand.

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Well, I won 2 of the 4 hands, but somehow I'm still in 4th place. David has jumped ahead to 2nd (only 4 points shy of 1st!).

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One of my winning hands.

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Marty discarding.

Weekend at the Coast

Over the weekend we went to the Oregon coast to photograph a wedding. The wedding went well, and we got lots of good pictures. We stayed in Astoria, where it rained violently! We were going to check out the Astoria Sunday Market, but instead took shelter in a cute coffee shop, with a huge jungle mural.

That's me, with a huge elephant in the background.

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Then we stopped in Clatskanie and had coffee with our friend Lisa, who recently returned from France. (Wow. It sounds like we had a lot of coffee. I think we actually had hot chocolate with Lisa!)

Lisa and David.

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On our way back to Portland, we followed the STP (Seattle to Portland bike ride) route. We saw a multitude of tandem bicycles, one unicycle, and one bicycle-built-for-three.

A tandem bicycle.

Amaretto Cherries

About a week ago we bought a flat of cherries, and set to work making amaretto cherries.

To make the process easier, we bought a cherry pitter. I had my doubts as to how well it would work. I figured that it would either take off half the cherry with the pit, or mangle the cherries. However, it worked beautifully, and we ended up with some lovely looking jars of cherries.

Welcome to Fiske Cottage!

Testing 1 2 3 . . .

Does it work?