David's Hat

I made David a new hat this year. He wore it to the dog park on Sunday. Isn't he cute?!

Bath Time

Sprocket is not so fond of baths, but he's getting better at it. I think that he looks kind of silly all covered in suds!

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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