Saturday Sunset Walk

Yesterday was a great day. It started with Jon bringing me coffee and a hot cinnamon bun, fresh out of the oven, as breakfast in bed.

After breakfast, Olive & I got dressed and went on a hike in the park as part of our Hikes with Dogs meetup group. We hiked 3.84 miles that included some tough hills. After the walk was over, I had to get a shot of Olive lounging in the daisies.

We came home, took a shower (I broke a sweat on that hike!) and then we all went out to pick up burgers for a late lunch.

We came home, ate our burgers, relaxed for a few hours (I intended to take a nap but ended up playing on my phone for a few hours) and then ended up going on a sunset walk. We left home around 6:30 p.m. and walked for about 2 hours, totaling about 4 miles. That's a lot of miles in a day for Olive and me!

The weirdest thing in Seattle is that it will sometimes get really sunny right before sunset. So, it will be cloudy all day, but then at 8:30 p.m., as the sun sets, it'll dip below the cloud cover before setting behind the mountains. It's glorious.

We walked down to the waterfront then north on Alaskan Way, up through Myrtle Edwards Park and we just kept going up the Elliott Bay Trail! 

We saw beautiful roses, and these were near the Sculpture Park, not even at the Rose Garden, which is coming up...

Jon tried to entice Olive into the Sound but she is not interested in swimming. At all.

And then we found the Rose Garden, which is tiny but beautiful.

And this Salmon Net Pen... you can see the little salmon jumping! Now, I wonder, do these count as "farmed" salmon then? On one hand, they're being raised like farmed animals, but the plan is to release them, at which point they'll be wild, right? I don't know. 

Olive took off running after this little bird, which I thought was a roadrunner, but it's not. 

Although it did continue to taunt her with a little "meep, meep" even as we continued up the trail!

Someone before us had already picked this off the bush. It smelled beautiful.

Family portrait. I love Olive's little 3-legged shadow.

Skateable Art Feature? I'm guessing that's Seattle for "skate park"?  I know someone whose husband might want to check out this skate park when it's finished!

I told you it gets sunny!

Cheese And Rice

A friend was visiting recently from Chicago and happened to comment that she's been trying to cut down on curse words (also called "swear words" which I've never understood... what are you swearing to?) Anyway, when she mentioned it, I realized that I haven't been using the f-bomb nearly as often as I used to, or any other bad words for that matter.

Probably:
1) Because I'm by myself most of the day! Who am I going to curse at, poor little Olive?
2) The public defender world was full of lots of colorful language (both from my colleagues and clients) and I've stepped away from that now
and
3) I'm pretty happy and stress-free most of the time, so there isn't much to curse about!

But, there may be another reason:

This Seattle Times article notes that a study found Washington the least foul-mouthed state in the U.S..

I thought for sure NJ/NYC would rank number one most foul-mouthed, but that honor went to Ohio, according to the article.

What could have me cursing in the near future?  I'm set to start a new jobs in a couple of weeks! It's part-time, so that should still leave me some free time for blogging, glassblowing, dog training and relaxing. I will be teaching undergraduate classes in criminal justice and legal/paralegal skills in the evenings three nights per week.

I'm joking, of course, that this might lead me to cursing. The worst I might say to my students might be   "h-e-double-diddly-hockey-sticks!"  Because I live in Seattle, obviously.

Baked Rotini

Hooray! Another food post! You ready? Good. I made a fabulous dinner tonight and I've got to tell you all about it.

I started with this baked ziti recipe on allrecipes.com.  And then I went crazy... When I follow a recipe, it is more or less just for an idea and the process, how long do things need to cook, what temperature, etc.  Here, I wanted to make it healthier by sneaking in a few more servings of vegetables and cleaning out some odds and ends from the refrigerator. The great thing about this recipe is that you could really use whatever you have on hand.

So this is how I did it:

• Pasta: 1 box of whole wheat rotini. I thought it was a 16 oz but upon closer inspection, the 16 oz box now only contains 13.5 oz. I guess that's the new cost cutting measure. 
• 1 lb. of ground turkey. I had some great farmers market organic ground turkey that I was dying to use. Of course you could use any other ground meat or go meatless.
• Veggies:  I used 1/2 an onion, 3 cloves of garlic, 1 big carrot, and 4 medium sized baby bella mushrooms. Basically, I cleaned out most of the veggies in my fridge. I'd say you want about 3-4cups of veggies total, but all aspects of this recipe are pretty flexible. Use what you've got.
• Cheese:  You want at least 2-3 cups of cheese. Again, I cleaned out all the cheese in my fridge and shredded it up, so I had some provolone, mozzarella, and, believe it or not, swiss! I mixed it all together after shredding it, so that I wouldn't have layers of different cheeses.
• 1 can of black olives 
• 1/2 cup of plain nonfat yogurt, this was my substitute for the sour cream.
• 26 oz. of pasta sauce
• 1 C of white wine
• A pat of butter
• A few pinches of salt
• About a teaspoon of brown sugar
• A few shakes of granulated garlic

I used my dutch oven and started by heating the butter.  I sliced the onions paper thin using the mandolin. I put them in with the butter, a pinch of salt and the brown sugar and let them cook on low for a while to caramelize the onions. Caramelizing onions always takes me forever, so I didn't bother to start the pasta or the preheat the oven until after I got there. I figured the sauce could always hang out and simmer if I needed it to.

While the onions were doing their thing, I chopped all my other veggies and put them in a bowl so they'd be ready when my pot was ready. I pressed the garlic using the garlic press my friend Hadley got me when she was out here. I sliced a carrot using the mandolin, since I had it out already. I chopped up the mushrooms tiny, I love mushrooms. I crushed and diced up the black olives, my husband loves black olives.  You could use any other vegetables - I think celery would be great here, I considered adding some spinach but I thought that might push Jon over the edge. In the end, I had a nice size bowl of vegetables, so that was good enough.

When the onions were nice and brown, I threw the ground turkey in. I like to add about half, let that start to cook, and then add the other half, just so I don't cool my pot too quickly.

Now preheat the oven to 375.

In a separate pot, boil some water, salt it, throw the Rotini in.  Cook about 8 minutes, stir occasionally.

When the turkey was almost all the way cooked through, I dumped my veggies in and stirred that.  I let that heat up while I was waiting for the water to boil and shredded my cheese.

Shred all the cheese. It doesn't need to be tiny because it's going to have time to melt. You could crumble it and you'd be fine. Since I used swiss and that's clearly not an Italian cheese, I shook a little garlic over my shredded cheese mixture and some "Italian Seasoning" from the herb shelf. There, that makes Swiss cheese Italian, doesn't it? Like I said before, I mixed all my cheeses together, rather than doing layers of different cheeses.

When the veggies were getting all soft and fragrant, I added the pasta sauce.  Suddenly, I thought that the pasta sauce wasn't going to be enough liquid to cover all the vegetables and all the pasta, so I decided to grab some white wine out of the fridge.

You know how you can never get all of the pasta sauce out of the bottle?  I poured the cup of white wine into the pasta sauce bottle, put the lid back on, and shook it like crazy over the sink. This got all the extra sauce off the sides of the bottle, so when I threw that the wine on top of the pasta sauce, it was tomato saucy and the bottle was clean!

I gave that a good stir, and let that simmer until the rotini was done. In the meantime, I also sprayed olive oil into the casserole dish to prevent sticking.

I drained the rotini. I put half on the bottom of the greased casserole dish.  Here comes the layering part, where the allrecipes.com site came in handy because I had a hard time envisioning the layers. I topped it with about 1/3 of the cheese. I then put the yogurt on top of that. The yogurt is hard to spread out, so my suggestion is to use a small spoon and just plop a little dollop every few inches so that you can spread it out as much as possible. It'll spread out a little more in the oven, the purpose is just to give it some creaminess.

I put half the veggie and sauce mixture on top of that, then the rest of the ziti, another 1/3 cheese, then the rest of the sauce, then I topped it with the last of the cheese.

I baked it about 30 minutes until it was all bubbly and the cheese was just starting to brown.

This was a pretty big dish, but I'll happily eat it as leftovers all week. I think it is a great compromise between a filling comfort food and a healthy food full of vegetables. If you're feeding someone who doesn't appreciate vegetables, the trick is to chop them as small as possible, let them sweat and soften in the pan before you add the sauce, and they'll be virtually invisible in the sauce.

Ok, the picture is out of focus... I was more concerned about digging in... but it came out looking a little  something like this.

It smelled heavenly and tasted even better. And, yay, leftovers!

And Now, For Olive's Newest Trick...

Olive knows quite a few basic commands so far: Sit, Lay Down, Stay, Come, Bed and Crate.

So it was time to work on more of a "trick."  We've been working on a pretty cool trick with Olive for the past few weeks, and we call it "pick it up." Basically, I drop something and she has to pick it up and drop it in my hand. It took a little while for her to get the hang of it, now she loves it.

We started off with easy things, like a tennis ball and a small stuffed toy. She would get so into it, she would keep trying to bring us things even after practice was over. Then we progressed to more difficult things like a drink coaster and an ID (both flat objects so she has to work a little harder to get them up off the floor.)  I kept trying to get her to pick up my keys, but she wouldn't do it, and I suspected that maybe she didn't want to try to pick up the metal in her teeth. I can't blame her. Then I remembered a rubbery keychain I had won on a cruise. I had her practice picking up that keychain by itself a few times, then added it to my keys.

Ready for the result?

I apologize to people viewing this on the mobile site, I don't think the YouTube embedding works that way, but here is the link, so you don't completely miss out. Enjoy!

Yelp Elite Event

I've been Yelp Elite for a couple of months now and I've enjoyed going to a few Yelp Elite Events. It's really fun to check out new businesses and chat with new people who are "in the know" about local happenings.

But tonight was Olive's first Elite event!  They had a great event at the headquarters of Rover.Com.

There was people food and doggie treats, an agility course, a doggy kissing contest and... a photo booth!

Olive got a yelp bandana and a doggy bag full of toys to bring home. She was so spoiled. I suspect she's going to expect the Elite treatment everywhere now!

Matter of fact, on the way home, Olive wanted to stop at Seattle Glassblowing Studio, even though they were closed!

"Open up... I want some Elite treatment!" 

Juxtaposition

I was walking home last week on a sunny day when I saw this little photo shoot going on near my home.

I don't know if you can see, but on the sidewalk behind her, there are two apparently homeless men lying on the sidewalk. Do you think that was intentional? Kind of a "beauty in urban grit" theme? 

To be fair, it was a beautifully sunny day, so maybe they were just soaking up the sun, not sleeping off their liquid breakfasts. Maybe.

Seattle Freeze Culture

I hadn't heard of "The Seattle Freeze" until we looked into moving here. If you haven't heard of it, here's an article from Pacific Northwest, the Seattle Times Magazine, that explains it really well.

To boil it down, the concept of "the Seattle Freeze" isn't that people are unfriendly, they're very friendly but in sort of a customer service way - chatty and polite, but you're never going to break that wall into friendship.

One article that I read said that you'll make a lot of friends that you can say "hi" to, but never any that are going to invite you to hang out. Another article had a guy explained that he'd made a lot of acquaintances but never a "take a bullet for you" type of friend.

So far, I haven't really encountered that, but many of the friends I've made have moved here recently. Even the Seattleites I have met are mostly people that are making an effort to make friends - going out to meetups, for example.

I kind of dislike the concept of "the Seattle Freeze." I think it can be kind of a cop out. "Oh, I never make any friends... probably because of the Seattle Freeze."  It's kind of like thinking that if people don't like you, they're probably jealous because you're so pretty or so successful. Maybe you're not so likable or nice or friendly yourself, right?

But my opinion changed this week. I've been taking a course to prepare to teach ESL (English as a Second Language, also known as English for Speakers of other Languages.)  One of the topics we covered in our class this was the concept of teaching our students American culture. For example, if your student comes to class late often, but is from a culture where it is considered acceptable to be late, it might be a "learning opportunity" to speak to your student or your class about the importance of timeliness.  Along these lines, the teacher gave us some examples of American culture multiple choice questions.

And then I saw this one...

I'm sorry, I can't figure out what the correct answer is supposed to be.

As for a) I think that if someone tells you to "drop by" and you spoke about a specific day and obviously spoke about his address or wherever it is that you "dropped by," than he should have honestly expected you to visit or should not have said that;
As for b) That doesn't really make sense, no particular Sunda was discussed; and
As for c) I can see the argument that you should have called, that's never a bad idea, but I don't think your friend had should have been "surprised and upset" without that call.

I think I'm bothered by the use of the word "friend" here. If someone is your "friend" they shouldn't be upset when you drop by, especially when you've discussed it and you came on the particular day they mentioned.

Ok, it might not be a good time. You might answer the door and say "Oh, I'm so sorry, I was just headed out" or "taking a shower" or "giving my dog a bath" and discuss a better time, but if you're an adult, I don't think that should "upset" you.

My class, full of Seattleites, unanimously agreed that "A" was the correct choice, that his friend extended the invite but didn't mean it.  Why?  Why would your friend say that, especially something specific? It'd be different if your friend had said, "We should hang out sometime," and then you showed up at their door the next weekend - that would be weird, and your friend would be rightfully upset.

I think teaching your students this would be perpetuating the Seattle Freeze culture. When your student becomes conversant, he might say "Let's meet up on Sunday at 1:00 p.m. at the mall, I'll be standing in front of Macy's" when he has no intention of showing up, because he was taught that this is American Culture.  I think we should instead teach "that friend is a jerk, you need better friends" and maybe get this friend to an etiquette lesson rather than our student a culture lesson.

Am I right?  (No, seriously, tell me - am I right? I'd love to hear from both Seattleites and non-Seattleites!)

I'm Juicing Like Roger Clemens

A friend recommended the movie "Fat Sick & Nearly Dead" to me many months ago, but I just got around to watching it last week. The movie is about the health benefits of juicing, and the narrator meets some people who are, appropriately, fat, sick and nearly dead, and introduces them to juicing, and (spoiler alert!) they became trim, healthy and lively.

Of course, after watching it, I wanted to run out and buy a juicer. But they start at about $100 and I'm not working.  I figured I could go the Bed Bath & Beyond route, with a 20% off coupon... but it still seemed like a lot of money to spend on something I wasn't sure about.

Then I had a moment of genius... Goodwill! The first Goodwill shop I went to (South Lake Union) didn't have any juicers and the worker there told me that they get them sometimes, but they always disappear quickly. Then we went to the larger store in Ballard and bam! They had one juice. An older Hamilton Beach model for the bargain price of $9.99. Sold.

I brought it home, and threw an apple in just to make sure it worked. Yum, the most delicious apple juice I had ever had!

Next stop: Grocery Outlet where I loaded a cart full of fruits and vegetables. And wine. Seriously, their wine is so cheap, and perfect for sangria! Anyway, where was I? Oh, fruits and vegetables. I got a bag of apples, a bag of oranges (I think they're tangelos?), carrots, red bell peppers, cucumbers, broccoli, onions, lemon, lime, garlic, ginger, cilantro and parsley. I also got a bag of potatoes because Jon has gotten into making his own potato chips.

Now, I'm not doing a juice "fast." I'm still eating regular food, but I am drinking juice as a mid-morning snack and having more like a snack (today, hummus and pita chips) for lunch.

Ready for some pictures?  Here you go... and a tragic story!

First juice! Oops, a couple of vegetables and I only got a half cup of juice!

Next juice I made. That beautiful red color is thanks to our delicious friend the red beet! 

For this juice, I was smart enough to take a photo of my ingredients before they went in. Which worked out realllly great when...

I had a very bad allergic reaction to this green juice. Itchy hands and feet, swollen lips and itch hives, it was a disaster. Two Benadryl and a three hour nap later, I woke up feeling better. So, what was the culprit? My best guess is parsley.  I've eaten all of the ingredients plenty of times, and I rinsed them really well with vinegar & water so I don't think pesticides or anything would be the culprit. I'm sure I've had parsley before, maybe accidentally ate my garnish... but never in this kind of quantity.  My plan is to wait a couple of days and try eating a piece of parsley and see how it goes.  Anyway, here is the offending allergy juice:

And today's juice.  I had to take two photos of the bowl to get all the goodness that was in there.  Broccoli, including the stems, red beets, including the greens, a clove of garlic, a handful of grapes and a tangelo. It was pretty good, but I was surprised how garlicky it was - and I love garlic. I guess the juicer really extracted the garlic juice! 

 

So far, so good. I've made a juice or two each day. Today I made another one, not photographed, when Jon came home from work, which made a great "hold 'em over" so that we could have a later dinner. (We've gotten into a weird habit of eating dinner at 5pm every day, which isn't always convenient.)

I'll probably keep going with my Goodwill juicer for a little longer, but I'd like to move up to a Breville eventually. I have a few friends who use the Breville, and they all love it.

Walking on Sunshine

It was gloriously sunny this morning in Seattle.

 

After our morning stretches, Olive & I headed out for a walk. 

Here's a little tad of street art. It reads "if you run away i will find you".  

Yes, Olive, we've got a microchip under your skin! 

Except that someone hand wrote underneath "and kill you." Sorry, Olive, I didn't mean it that way!

We walked to the Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle. 

With my favorite little model. 

I've wondered exactly what the Seattle Center Armory was, because I've heard that they have awesome happy hours. I got to check it out, and basically it's a great food court above a children's museum.

Olive liked it too.

We saw a squirrel, and it drove Olive crazy.  It went through that fence. I thought we were going to have to stand around here forever! (Notice her tongue hanging out!)

Tilikum Place with Chief Seattle and the Space Needle.

Olive & I loved soaking up the sunshine. I could have stayed outside all day. 

 But, after, little Olive was tired out! And so was I!

Earth Day Parade

I've seen a lot of parades in my day, but this was my first Earth Day parade!

One of the hot button issues here in Seattle is the transport of coal via train. Some investigation has shown that the coal often falls off the train and into our waters. So of course, there was a coal train in the parade. Not to be confused with a Coltrane, which would've made for an even awesomer parade. With better music.

Photo credit to Jon, who snapped some pics for the blog! 

Happy Earth Day everyone!

That's Very Seattle

I've noticed a parked car a few blocks from my home, I usually walk past it when I walk Olive.

It has one of those bright orange stickers on the window that usually indicate that the car is going to be booted or towed. I don't really know the rules in Seattle, regarding parking tickets and towing and whatnot, so, walking by with Olive this morning, I decided to stop and read the orange sticker.

Basically, the sticker is dated 2 days ago, and says that if the car is not moved by tomorrow it could be towed or impounded, and cites a Seattle statute about cars being parked on the street in the same spot for more than 72 hours.

Alright, fair enough. There was no boot or anything on the car that I could see, so basically, this is just a warning. Then I noticed that the ticket under the windshield wiper had some writing on it in magic marker.

I'm nosey. I had to read it.

(And snap a picture so you can read it too. Cropped and rotated for your viewing pleasure!)

Someone took the time to write, directly on the envelope the driver is supposed to use to return the payment to the City of Seattle:

I love you (in a heart) that you git (sic) these tickets all the time + don't seem to care. 

Someone had taken the time to not only leave a note, but to draw a heart. And if you're going to stop and express your admiration for just one person or one great thing in the whole city today, it's going to be the person who shows utter nonchalance about receiving parking tickets. That's so Seattle.

I love you (in a heart) that someone took the time to leave this note and express their love. I love you too, Seattle.

Whidbey Island Adventure

We took off this weekend for our first (hopefully of many) Washington road trip adventure.

We drove north through some pouring rain and headed to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. My mother's cousin met us up there and showed us around the tulip route.

It was beautiful! There were tulips in every direction, fields of color like I had never seen before, and varieties of tulips I never imagined. I'm so glad we made the trip up there.

Then we went through Deception Pass on our way to Whidbey Island. This is an amazing bridge and the views are stunning, even on a cloudy day. I can only imagine it on a clear day. In fact, the next day a marathon route ran across this bridge, that has to be the most scenic marathon route in the world. How could you run past? I'd want to stop and take in the sights! (Note to my marathon running friends, come on out here for this one next year!)

We stayed at Carol's house on Whidbey Island. As a child, Carol lived with my great-grandmother, my favorite grandmother's mother. It was so interesting to hear all about my great-grandmother from her.

The next morning we had an amazing breakfast at a nearby seafood place. I had crabcake benedict and it was deee-licious!

Then we went to the Naval Base, NAS Whidbey Island. This was my first time on a Navy Base and it was pretty cool. I really liked looking around the Exchange, the shopping area for the military and their families. They had an awesome variety of products, which I guess makes sense because it is much more convenient for them to go shopping nearby and on their own schedule. I liked looking at all the products specifically marked Navy. You could even get "Navy Dog" t-shirts for your dog! And there was a frozen yogurt place in the exchange! Very cool. I love frozen yogurt!

On the way to the ferry, we stopped at this great store called 3 Sisters featuring locally farmed items and bought some grass fed beef from a butcher and lavender chocolate chip cookies from a lavender farm. (Next road trip, I'd like to go visit the lavender farm!) Leaving 3 Sisters, I noticed that we were about a block away from a great cliff over the water so we walked over there to take some pictures.

It was beautiful and sunny and warm and perfect.

But then it got even better. We heard swoop, swoop, swoop, and we turned to look up... and saw a large bird had landed on top of the telephone pole right next to where Jon was standing.

A bald eagle! Amazing! 

We continued on to the ferry. I sometimes get car sick if I'm a passenger in a car, not a driver. I never ever get seasick on a boat. Want to guess how I did in a car on a ferry?  Not so great, I actually had to get out of the car and stand so that my body would feel more like a boat passenger and less like a car passenger. Suddenly, as soon as I was out of the car, I felt better. It was the weirdest sensation. 

But the views were beautiful. The 20 minute ferry ride flew by.  

Olive didn't care for the ferry much. Maybe she gets car-on-a-boat sick too.

We had a fabulous weekend! I know it was the first of many road trips to come and what a way to kick it off! We love it. I'm so thankful to have family here, especially when they're such fabulous people. 

I can't wait to see the rest of Washington!