So, since I currently don’t have a job for the first time since the age of 15, I have actually had time to cook, which makes me happy.  I wouldn’t say I’m a great cook, but I really enjoy feeding people- I’ll happily cook almost anything, even red meat, which I’ve never actually eaten, if I know that people are going to appreciate it.  (I have been told that I cook things I don’t eat better than food that I do, and I have no idea why.  Even Mike, who is always eager to tell me what is wrong with a dish “so I can learn more” says that my meatloaf is the best he has ever eaten.  I have no idea what it tastes like.)  But in normal life, things  get hectic and I get lazy, so if we eate at home 3 times a week I considered it a home run.

Lately though, we’ve been eating home-cooked dinners 5 or 6 nights a week, which I consider a small miracle, because in order to feed Mike, I have to make at least 2 side dishes to go with any main course.  He is really passionate about side dishes.  Not only have I been good about actually planning out meals ahead of time, which really does slash our grocery budget, but I’ve been producing fairly successful fare lately, so much so that Mike actually told me that the goat-cheese stuffed chicken breast I made tonight was “as good as restaurant food.”  This is huge.

I can’t take all the credit though.  I may be getting a little better with practice, but the real star of our food lately is the fact that we are living in a wonderland of produce.  This week, the veggie-palooza got even better with the addition of this:

You see, last week, at the reccomendation of a friend in my knitting group up here, I signed up for a CSA, specifically, the one run by New Roots Organics.  It’s amazing.  When I opened up the bin this morning, I was so excited that I did a little happy dance outside our door.  It’s filled with fresh, locally grown, delicious, organic produce, including red leaf lettuce, crisp fall apples, big ears of super sweet corn, beets (Mary, what are beets made of?), and super sweet ridiculously yummy peaches, among other good stuff.  Thanks to this magic vegetable delivery service, I’ve been able to up the ante on the required side dishes and teach Mike that he likes far more vegetables than he ever knew- yesterday, he asked for MORE LEEKS and tonight he destroyed a pound of green beans (I helped a little, of course).  If you asked him last week, he would have told you that he didn’t like either of these things.

The best part of this whole thing is that it’s ridiculously inexpensive.  The bin we’re getting is the smaller size (I may upgrade later to the regular size), it’s only $25 per delivery, and you can choose if you want it every week or every other week (I signed up for every other week, but I may end up bumping it up to every week, we’ll see).  If I went to say, Whole Foods, and bought this much produce, I’d be out twice that much money.

So yes, I recognize that I just wrote an entire blog post about how awesome vegetables are, but I’m really excited.  We may have moved to a strange city where it is going to be dark and grey and rainy for half the year, but at least I can spend my time swimming in an ocean of organic spinach.

By the way, any suggestions on what to do with the beets?

YAY: Saturday I successfully slept in almost as late as Mike.  This is a major accomplishment for my unable to sit still self.

BOO: We didn’t get out of the house until 1:00 pm, which means we wasted half of what is probably one of the last really nice weekends of summer here.  We suck.

YAY: We made it to the grand opening of the Colonnade Mountain Bike Skills Park.  (I think they should have called it a “Skillz” park.  ::groan::).  It was really cool- well built, much bigger than I would have ever imagined, and only 2 miles from our house.

BOO: Mike’s bike is still broken from his last trip to Mammoth.  Something tells me that will get fixed soon.

YAY: The mountain bike park has an off-leash dog park!!

BOO: I still don’t have a dog because my husband doesn’t really love me.

YAY: We found a really awesome Thai restaurant down the hill from our house.  Yum.

BOO: We have to walk back up the hill after we eat there.

YAY: Mike actually went to the farmer’s Market with me in Ballard Sunday morning.  Total food Pr0n + somebody to help me carry stuff.

YAY: I made a ton of progress on a lace scarf I am knitting.  I just started this on Tuesday:

BOO: My stupid wrist is still hurting when I knit or bike or lift things.  I think I’m going to end up having to do physical therapy.

YAY: We saw Burn After Reading on Sunday night.  It was pointless and self-mocking and it entertained me so much that I actually stayed awake through the whole thing- yeah, that’s right Ben, I stayed awake during an entire MOVIE!

BOO: Mike got so frustrated trying to park downtown before the movie that he ended up driving to a mall outside the city to see it.  We both agreed that it’s time to conquer our deep-rooted Orange County-born-and-raised fear of public transportation and start using the bus system.

YAY: All the new TV shows are **this close** to actually starting full-force.  Gossip Girl and Bones have already come back to us (squeeee) along with a handful of new shows: 90210 2.0 (eh), Fringe (has some definately nerdy X-Files-ish potential) and Privileged (I don’t think Mike has seen this yet, but it might end up being cute).  I know it’s lame and low-brow, but I love TV.  Mike and I are the best at lying around and watching TV.  We would totally medal if watching television while knitting (me) and looking at car forums (Mike) was an Olympic team sport.

BOO: TV definately limits productivity.  But I love it anyways.

BOO THE SEQUEL: Speaking of Gossip Girl, Blair is putting out an album:

This weekend was the grand opening of the I-5 Colonnade Mountain Bike Skill Park built below the 5 freeway near our house. We are seriously a hop, skip and jump away from this new amazing man made creation. Both Aubrey and I were pleasantly surprise at how vast and well built it was. I mean we were thinking “what can a bunch of guys really build underneath the 5 freeway?” Aubrey’s reaction? “Holy Crap.”

The park has a bit of everything for anyone who rides a mountain bike. From 60 year old guys on cross country bikes riding the beginner section to the young kid hitting the 7 foot wooden ladder drop, it’s for everyone looking for a good time. Best of all? Everything is free! Okay enough with the time wasting. I’m off to the bike shop to get my bike ready. Click on the photos to visit my Flickr gallery. I tried to document  the place as much as possible for my riding friends back at home. You know who you are. Enjoy!

… a SUPAH-STAH…

My friend Anne is a total crafty superstar in general, but today she made her official high-profile debut by getting a pattern published in Knitty, the world’s best free online knitting magazine.

Anne designed Morgan, an English driving cap.  I seriously cannot describe how excited I am for her and how proud I am to be her friend and business partner (she is the creative spark behind Handicraft Cafe.  Go buy our yarn!)

Anne modeling her creation:

Here are some other pictures that we shot of Morgan, courtesy of some very talented knitwear models:

Seriously, this is just the beginning of Anne’s knitwear design career.  She really is one of the most talented people I’ve ever known.  And now she’s FAMOUS!

The multiplying ghost has struck again.

As long as I have known Mike, he has sworn up and down that he is haunted by a multiplying ghost.  )A “multiplying ghost” is a mythical spirit that duplicates items of clothing.)  While neither of us has ever seen the actual ghost, we have both seen its results- at least once a year, we find two versions of the same t-shirt or sweatshirt where there previously was only one.  Tonight, when he was looking for a t-shirt, Mike found 2 Google shirts.

He swears that he only bought one (the shirt is at least 2 years old).  I’ve done his laundry for as long as we’ve lived together, and I only remember one Google shirt.  There are only two explanations: 1) somebody else had the same Google shirt and left it at our house before we moved, or 2) the multiplying ghost has struck again.

Help us solve the mystery.  If you are somebody who used to spend a lot of time at our house in Anaheim and you are missing a Google shirt, please tell me.  Otherwise, I’m a little freaked out.  :/

Bad attempt at a pun, I know.  I apologize.

Anyways, this weekend we made an attempt to take advantage of the good weather while it lasts.  People are neurotic about the weather turning bad here.  Now that September has hit, you can hear feverish whispers and neurotic plan-making everywhere you go as Seattlites try and suck up every bit of sunshine they can get there hands on.  So on Sunday, we escaped the city, and went to Snoqualmie Falls:

The falls are only 30 minutes outside the city, but the drive still gave Mike a chance to drive a bit on “fun” (read: not congested and poorly laid out like the ones around us) roads for once.  He was happy.  However, he was even happier once we parked and went to grab some snacks, where he was ridiculously delighted to find out about the existence of this:

Seriously, he talked for ten minutes about how awesome it was that Nestle had finally solved the Crunch to ice cream ratio by embedding the ice cream with little Crunch balls.  I’ve never heard him so excited about dessert.  This was my soundtrack as we made our way down the path to the falls.

He then got excited again when he saw this sign:

Ugh.  Only bad people don’t like dogs.

The trail was gorgeous.  It was also only a mile round trip so Mike didn’t really complain about having to walk too much.  I powered on ahead and he carried the camera, so we have about 30 pictures that basically look like this:

Yes, I’m totally rocking the “jacket tied around my waist” look.  I thought it would be colder.

Right before you get to the falls, you pass an ominous concrete building that is totally fenced off and filledwith mysterious machines:

Mike thought it was where they kept the Velociraptors.  It is actually used to harvest energy from the falls, but his idea was far more entertaining.

Finally, we got to the official end of the trail, where we saw tubers!

Maybe THIS is where Indian River really is!

When the trail ends, you can’t actually see the waterfall.  So we did what everybody else was doing- climb OVER the observation deck and scale down to the rocky riverbank, trying desperately not to fall and break a bone (at least I felt like this, there were toddlers who were making the climb without a care in the world), and walk over rocks for another quarter of a mile.  Along the way, you see more of the river:

You can also climb out onto random rocks in the water, which Mike immediately did:

Finally, you get to see the actual falls.  They are really breathtaking:

We tried to get somebody to take a picture of us with the waterfall in the background (or rather, I tried to get somebody to take a picture of us and Mike tried to stop me), but they didn’t really get the point of this request:

At least they were nice enough to take a picture of us.  As usual, it’s a terrible picture of me.  I mostly chose to include it because I love that Mike wore black socks with shorts and tennis shoes.  Made.my.day.

When you are 7, it’s easy to make friends.  All you have to do is walk up to somebody and ask them if they want to go on the slide or make a sandcastle, and BAM!  You’ve got a best friend for life.  Or at least for the next couple of hours.  Life is good.

When you are 27, it’s a little bit harder.  You don’t meet people as often.  Strangers look at you like you’re crazy if you wander up to them and ask them to partake in the joy of playground equipment.  Since Mike and I just moved to a new city, we find ourselves totally stripped of our old, wonderful, comfortable circle of friends.  You can make friends at work (not that I’m employed at the moment), but it’s always a bit tricky to figure out how much you can mix work and friendship.  So at this advanced age, I think that the best way to at least try and make new friends is to try and rely on hobbies.

As everybody who knows me knows, my hobby is knitting.  Admittedly, I’m a bit obsessed- check out my passion project at www.handicraftcafe.com!  (And buy something!  Our yarn is awesome!)  So in an effort to further my obsession and to meet some new friends, yesterday I joined some awesome girls that I met on Ravelry to go on a trip to Churchmouse Yarns, a cute yarn shop on Bainbridge Island.

To get there, we met up at the dock and took the ferry.  The yarn and needles came out almost immediately:

The shop itself was cute.  I picked up some Malabrigo Laceweight merino yarn because a) it’s a line we are considering carrying in our store, and b) it feels like butter.  I also picked up some teas- earl grey lavendar and ginger.  Yum.

After perusing the store, we grabbed lunch and had some good conversation.  It was nice to spend some time with girls again. We wandered around the island a bit to walk off lunch and take in the beautiful day spent on the island:

I was definatley fully and sleepy on the ferry ride home, but I did get a gorgeous shot of Mt. Ranier thanks to the ridiculously beautiful weather:

Knitters definately made my day.

You know sometimes you have a moment where you are forced to realize that you have basically become your parent(s)?  This happened to me yesterday.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I really do have a lot in common with my mom.  We are both outgoing, we both talk wayyyyy too much, we are both a wee bit germaphobic (although my mom somehow combines that with actually being neat, whereas I am a total slob who is only reigned in by Mike’s love of things looking organized), and we both LOVE Splenda.  But I feel like these things are normal.  There are other, more ominous behavior patterns that we share that actually make me shudder.

So yesterday when we were talking and she told me that she hurt herself while WATCHING Michael Phelps win his butterfly event a couple of weeks ago, I laughed.  Then I shuddered.  Who the hell gets so excited watching something on television that they fall off a couch and hurt themself?

Oh yeah, that is totally something I would do.

Thankfully (and here’s another sign that we are the same person), she then took pictures of her injury and sent them to me:

Awesome.

She also sent me this picture, which has nothing to do with anything, but says a lot about my family:

Hi kids.

I made it back alive (and only slightly bruised, but that’s another story).  Last week I joined my two best friends, Mary and Scott; Mary’s sister, Deborah (who departed for her ridiculously awesome-sounding Semester at Sea on Friday); and a new friend, Jenny, for a fabulous stay in the Bahamas.  I’ll try and summarize with minimal long-windedness :

This is Deborah.  She called the comforter ahead of time to make sure that they matched:

This is my best friend Mary.  We also like to match:

This is my other favorite person ever, Scott:

This is Scott’s friend Jenny.  Jenny is AWESOME:

Highlights of the trip included…

dirty coconut cocktails and shark tunnels:

floating in the lazy river and sitting in the giant chair:

manta rays and self-portraits:

gangsta’ signs and rum runners:

the complete destruction of a 5 pound Hogfish at a restaurant called “The Poopdeck“:

and this little piece of evidence that we found at a trashy tourist bar called Senor Frog’s:

Evidently our favorite ingénue has a secret past that none of us ever knew about!