Cold Turkey...

It was almost a disaster.

Carrie and I had planned on grill-roasting our turkey. I had gotten the turkey prepped, cleaned, rinsed, brined, rinsed again, and set on a nicely preheated, cleaned grill with woodchips for smokiness.

Then it happened.

We ran out of propane - at 3 in the afternoon - on Thanksgiving.

*sigh*

I would like to be able to say "luckily, Lowes was open until 4, and, after much heroic effort and mad-dashing down Beacon Hill, I made it to the store with 10 minutes to spare, and I was able to trade in my existing propane tank for a new one, and all was good." Alas, such was not to be the case. No place that sold propane was open in Seattle, and Carrie and I hastily re-jiggered the course d' cuire, and our Thanksgiving dinner was only an hour delayed.

Everything turned out great  - the appetizers set the stage nicely, the turkey and stuffing was moist, the green beans, cornbread and beets were delicious, and the desert was fantastic.  We spent that meal doing something very un-Thanksgiving-like - watching season three of Deadwood - but to each their own ;)

I spent most of the day after doing projects around the house, attempting to strike items off of the ever-growing list that, inevitably, every homeowing husband finds awaiting him. Lest you think that I do these things grudgingly, however, know that I'd much rather work for our gratification in our own house than someone else's in an apartment - or not at all, even, since the results of my efforts work to enrich our lives directly. Also, before you get the impression that the list is solely a "honey-do" list, let me also add that many of  the items on it were directly contributed by me.

Our Thanksgiving menu

Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Here's what we're having today! 

Thanksgiving menu

Appetizer

Crackers

Cheeses

Olives

Gherkins in vinegar

Main Course

Grill - roasted Turkey w/ homemade cornbread and pork sausage dressing and whole cranberry sauce

Roasted and marinated beets

Baked sweet potatoes with butter

Challah

Steamed green beans in a mustard - shallot vinagrette

Desert

Pumpkin Spice cupcakes w/ cream cheese frosting

Wine selection

2006 Paul Jaboulet Aine Parallele 45

2007 Waterbrook Columbia Valley Pinot Gris

2008 Domingo Molina Torrontes

2008 Felie a Deve Menage a Trois

Beer

Bellhaven Scottish Strout

Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout

2009 Abyss Reserve

The Day Before

One of  the good things about working in the tech industry is that, if you have the right setup, you can work from home on occasion. Varolii issues laptops to its employees, and the VPN connection is usually very reliable; more often than not, the only chokepoint is my own wireless network; thankfully, since we dumped Clearwire (whose service in both Leschi and mid-Beacon Hill has never been that great in the first place) in favor of Qwest DSL, we don't have much of a problem in that area.

I bring up the above so as to set the stage for the meat of my post today. I elected to work from home because I promised Carrie that I would pick up our Thanksgiving turkey this morning from Bob's Quality Meats in Columbia City so that I could dunk it into a quick-brine solution for overnight. Before I could do that, however, I had to go to a doctor's appointment in Belltown. After that, I would have to make my way to Columbia City, pick up the turkey, then schlep it back home in time to call in for a 11:00 AM meeting and get a few hours of work in before breaking to prep for T-Bird day.

Having accomplished all of my work-related goals for today, I'm content to sign off and spend the evening with Carrie getting things readiy for a wonderful feast tomorrow.

If I, for some reason, don't say it tomorrow - Happy Thankgiving!

Firs two rooms - done!!

Well, we have two parts of our house pretty much done. First up is the hallway.

Before:

After:

 

As you can see, we've replaced the faux-cantina colors with a warmer sandpiper - tan all around, and painted the ceiling to match.

Next, the kitchen:

 

And after...

The Sandpiper pretty much wraps around here to the wall on  the right in the second "after" photo here, where we decided upon a darker brown with orange highlights in it.  I liked the color scheme before; I love it now, since it's much more "us".

Twilight

Nope, not the movie with the big-haired dude in it (probably more than one, since there are supposedly werewolves in this one, injected to provide a supernatural take on the Hatfields vs. McCoys, I suppose). I prefer my Vampire flicks to run more to either to the classic (think either Nosferatu or Bram Stroker's Dracula) or to the grittily un-romantic (30 Days of Night) than to the (what I view as being ultimately misandronist) drivel that were adapted from Anne Rice's "classics" (and yes, I did read "Interview with a Vampire", "The Vampire Lestat", and "The Queen of the Damned" when I was a much younger person), and the teenage - marketed pap that they, in turn, inspired.

Bloody heck - what was the point of this post?

Oh yeah - it's getting darker much earlier in Seattle now. I think that the sun actually starts going down around 3:30 these days.  No wonder this time of year depresses me so.

Nibbana

I just learned last night that a classmate of mine died recently. She was only a few months younger than I. In truth, even though I do remember having sparse interactions with her twenty years ago, I didn't really know her that well, and, strangely, that makes her death a bit more poignet for me.

Had I known her better, I could regret her passing properly, and perhaps have something a bit more meaningful to offer in the general forum where her friends, family and acquaintances  congregate. As it is, however, I am finding that death hits uncomfortably close to me - which it has done on rather few occasions within memory - and instead of feeling either sadness or nothing, I feel oddly transitional, and almost in denial about my own mortality.

In that sense, therefore, I have this (probably selfish) wish that I either had known this person better or not at all; the former so that I could properly first commiserate her death and then celebrate her life and have both acts convey respect and relevance; the latter so that, just as I do with the many other passing of individuals who are faceless to me, mournfully recognize the abstract concept of the shuffling off of yet another person from this world whilst remaining supremely aware of my own existence - and, for yet a short while longer - blissfully ignorant (or willfully in denial) of the certain alternative. Having slightly known this person, however, I can only, in reality, accomplish but shades of either stance whilst wishing to fully realize one or the other.

On the other hand, perhaps such imperfect ambivalence is but a part of the human experience, and it's out of an overblown sense of my own importance coupled with a denial of the absurd being that I occasionally am that leads me to feel that I need to fully express one stance - intimate regret  - or the other  - distanced acknowledgment. There is a grey line where Yin and Yang meet, and - for but a short while - we all live there, whether we do so consciously or not. Both a desire for the security that I get from certitude and my forgetfulness of how transitory this state of being truly is may be what's causing me to deny the legitimacy of my own feelings in this matter. In that case, I'll happily take my cue from wiser people than me, who have fallen in physical form, but risen anew in memory, and live as such, translated and transformed, until this day. That is the blessing that I wish is bestowed upon my fallen classmate, and is a desire that I have for myself one day.

U.S. Healthworks - a "Like" story

Let me begin by saying that I have no doubt that places such as U.S. Healthworks exist for a reason, and I'm sure that, for many people, the level of care that they receive there is more than adequate to meet their needs. I'd also like to say that I normally dnn't consider myself to be an elitist when it comes to the level of medical help that I feel that I deserve.

That having been said, my visit recently to the USH facility on Denny was creepy, to put it mildly.  The receptionist wasn't the sharpest tack on the posterboard, and kept touching her hands to her face - which I think is a no-no when you are working in a doctor's office. The office itself was unkempt, but nowhere near as disheveled as the MDA (I'm assuming that's some sort of medical assistant) who took me back to the room. Hirsute, overweight, unshaven for probably about three days, dressed in tattered scrubs, and wearing beat-up tennis shoes, I was almost tempted to think that I was - well, on Scrubs! The highlights of my interaction with him: he taking a strange slip of paper from a desk drawer and silently thrusting it towards my mouth, leaving it to me to decipher that said piece of paper was really a disposable thermometer; and him cranking the air pressure to about 300 psi so that he could take my blood pressure. Note to the nurse: after having squeezed my arm from my body, it's bound to be low.

At the very least the doctor herself seemed to be competant at what she does.  But the sheer level of heat in the office was so great that I almost got sick a couple of times, and she had to ask me if nausea was part of my symptoms. Nope - I'm pretty sure that me departing the Sahara in July will help to alleviate this sickness that I'm feeling...

Ah, sigh, such was my experience with Urgent Care in the great state of Washington.  I left with many memories, but - more importantly - I left with prescriptions in hand.

Pretty amazing friends have we

As many of you know, we've spent a lot of time over the past couple of months attempting to paint the majority of our house. We started on Memorial Day weekend with the rather over-eager expectation that we would be able to paint the kitchen, hallway, kids' room and living room over the course of three days. Even if Carrie hadn't needed an emergency appendectomy on that Saturday, just the process of taking down all of the (badly installed) hardware was enough to convince us that we were in for the long haul.

Amidst all of this, I drove down to Eugene, Oregon for training one weekend, and then drove all the way back up from Roseburg (which is a small town about an hour south of Eugene) (don't ask) all pretty much in one shot and royally messed up my back in the process (note to self: when driving long distances, take plenty of breaks to stretch out, and set the seat back a bit so that you're not driving in a ramrod-stiff position for hours on in!). That combined with the insane amount of reaching up that I had to do in order to paint the ceiling pretty much did me in this past weekend. On Saturday afternoon, Carrie and I had to go to U.S. Healthcare so that I could get a prescription for muscle relaxers, pain meds, and anti-inflammatory medications.

U.S. Healthcare – remind me to tell you about that place...

Anyhow....

This is where my pretty amazing friends come in. One weekend, Carrie's friend Alex (who served as one pretty kick-ass DJ for our wedding) helped us paint, and for two weekends, her friend Refugio and ex, John, chipped in as well. Recently, Carrie's sister, Carla, came up for nine days to help us out. Not only did she help me get virtually all of the painting done in the aforementioned areas, she also caulked the trim, cleaned up the major messes, helped Carrie put a tarp over our leaky shed, and helped Carrie clean out and organize the studio space, freeing up 400 square feet for exercise, crafts, and guest quarters. This is the same woman who, during our wedding a year ago, wrangled the caterers and cafe employees so that our guests would get fed and had plenty of drinks to quench their thirst – so that Carrie and I could enjoy that wonderful evening without a worry in the world.

I'm personally grateful to Alex, Ref, John and Carla for her help, and Carrie and I are breathing much easier in our newly painted residence (pics to come soon), knowing that, at least for now, the big projects are out of the way. I've a list about a mile long (and growing) of items that I need to do, but those are all smaller projects that I can tackle on nights and weekends.

The way things are...

The past twenty years of my life have been spent pretty much going from place to place, never settling in any one locality for more than three years or so. That cycle has been broken a little bit ever since my move here to Washington state, but the nigh-inevitable effects have always been there, and persist to this day: close friendships which may have been formed in one place fade to mere relationships, then silence after I move away, and – given my own rather introverted personality - I am slow to form new ones in my new locale. Meanwhile, my family – on both sides, never the closest or most affectionate bunch – remains pretty much where they were when I left Maryland two decades ago, content to stride in place in both location and life; not that such is necessarily a bad thing, but simply just how things are.

I offer the above preamble to highlight what is probably my biggest fear when it comes to my own impending fatherhood: for the most part -and for the foreseeable future – Carrie and I will be undertaking the wonderful journey that is parenthood pretty much alone. We have a few wonderful friends out here in Seattle, but for many days, it will be the two of us, doing what we can to give our children the love, attention and support that they need and deserve.

This realization saddens and terrifies me in its awesomeness, but it also, strangely, heartens me as well, for there are people upon whose munificence we can occasionally count, and this will (hopefully) motivate my Carrie and me to seek out others who can become friends to us, and whom we can become friends to as well. In this, I see opportunities for a truer appreciation of those who are around us, and who will be, and the expansion of our currently small circle of friends.

That is a good thing!

Latest on Babies...

As some of you may have heard, at the time when Carrie and I found out what gender each of our children were going to be, we also found out that there might be an issue with Baby B. It turns out that there is a growth on its umbilical cord close to where it goes into the baby's abdomen, and that this could be an indicator of a chromosomal abnormality. In the weeks following the discovery, however, we had another series of ultrasonic scans, and the growth which at one time was thought to be originating from the belly is in actuality a good centimetre out. All of the baby's measurements are fine, and it's growing at rate that's consistent with a singleton at its stage (which means that, given that it's a twin, it's actually growing faster than is normal, which is a good thing). So, we and the genetic counsellors are guardedly optimistic that this will be a normal pregnancy.

Throughout all of this, Carrie's family has been greatly supportive, sending us many well-wishes and always showing thier concern by asking us about how the kids are doing. Her sister Carla has even come up for a few days and is helping us out with some of our lingering projects, such as the ever-present painting (more about this later. The two of us are very grateful to have them in our lives.