Blake Visits!

So our very good friend (and a fantastic human being) Blake Sawyer was out here in Bellevue for a conference, and stuck around for about week to stay with us and hang out in Seattle.

We attempted to show him the ropes. I can’t speak for him, but we had a great time. We experienced more, met more cool people, did more things, (and drank more) in that quick action-packed week, than it seems we have done in the entire time we have lived here.  It was a wild, wild ride.

Throughout the week we visited many of the different neighborhoods (each of their own variety): Greenwood, Ballard, Fremont, the University District, Belltown, and Downtown.

....and essentially did a bar-tour of several Seattle neighborhoods in the process....

The places we drank.

 ...and ate at many fine food establishments.

The places we ate.

We saw a Dr. Dog  show at the beautiful Neptune Theatre.

Dr. Dog show.

We showed him some of the local landmarks: Gasworks Park,   Seattle Center, …

...the Gum Wall

We rode the Monorail. As you can tell, Blake was giddy as a school girl.

We walked through the Seattle Library (see the earlier post for a more extensive explanation), but this time we stumbled upon the "Red Room", which must have originated in the mind of Willy Wonka himself!

 You can barely see Blake in his red shirt in the Red Room of the Seattle Library

Went to Pike Place Market and bought some Salmon,  Romanesco broccoli, and bok choy to cook a delicious diner.

Note the mind blowing fractal pattern of the  Romanesco broccoli !!! Beautiful.

We took the ferry to Bainbridge Island.  Given the amount of water around everywhere, there are many ferries in these parts, but until now we haven't taken any. The views of the city were phenomenal. Note: the weather in these pictures is pretty typical Seattle weather; overcast.

leaving in daylight

Our new friend Danny, Blake, and myself on the ferry

Blake, Me, and Tess on the chilly, windy, outside deck of the ferry

While we were over on Bainbridge Island, we did some wine tasting and ate at an amazing restaurant called Hitchcock’s. Where we had….  

Clams & Pork Belly,   Quail,  and Octopus

and returning to Seattle by ferry at night.

We also went to the Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection, but that experience was so fantastic that it will have a post all to itself. Stay tuned, as that blog post should be up soon. 

In conclusion, we had a blast hanging out with Blake! Having visitors is great incentive to go out on adventures and experience the wonderful things about the city and the surrounding areas. So, if you are reading this... come visit us! We would love to experience the PNW with you!

New Kitchen Shelves

When we returned from our Christmas trip in Colorado we had unanticipated cargo. Tess’ Dad bestowed upon us the privilege of first dibs on his pile of misfit tools.  It could quite possibly be the most practical, useful, and best (unexpected) Christmas present ever.

When we got home I got right down to cleaning up the tools to a new luster. I turned our small shed into the workshop space I have always wanted, complete with tabletop space and a vice(!), and we got to work! It couldn't have come at a better time, as we have projects lining up. Tess and I love to build custom furniture and we have had a few ideas in mind since we moved in.

First on the list was this awkward space in the kitchen where we had a cheap metal shelf.

  We came up with an idea for custom shelves and made it happen.

Here is the finished product!

And this is what the full corner looks like now. (We put up the pot rack too.)

Stay tuned for future projects!

Geology Lesson

On the remainder of the trip from Jackson to Seattle we made a few stops worth noting. First, the Grand Tetons are right outside of Jackson. They are absolutely gorgeous.

Grand Tetons.... looking very small.

Then we took a small detour to go see the Craters of the Moon lava fields in Idaho. Yes folks, you heard correctly; there are lava fields in Idaho! ... and you thought there only potatoes there! They are no longer active and haven’t been for about 10 million years. Side note; on the drive out towards the lava we passed the world’s first nuclear power plant, which is now a tourist attraction, but only during the summer L otherwise we would have seen that too! 

Why there are lava fields in Idaho makes so much more sense when you learn the science behind it. It is a vestige of the same hotspot  (or caldera)  that currently makes mud boil and geysers erupt from Yellowstone National Park! Side note; that caldera is a supervolcano, poised to wipe humanity off the face of the Earth, but we will save that blog post for when it occurs. So, back to the whys and wherefores of the Idaho lava fields. Back in the day, the continent's crust was moving Southwest as the hotspot essentially stayed in place, carving out the Snake River Plain and settling at its current location: Yellowstone! How fascinating! I found it to be a very satisfying explanation for why lava fields exist in Idaho.

This map is the interactive display. I added the colored shapes to highlight the lava fields (diamond), Yellowstone (circle), direction of continental shift (arrow), and Jackon, WY (orange spot). The dotted rings are the path the hotspot took as it progressed to Yellowstone.

Map of hotspot movement over the last 10 million years.

Lava formations

Us at Craters of the Moon

Sagan loved it !

Jackson Hole Wyoming

Andrew, me, Tess, Steve in the Elk antler arches in town square

On the way back we took a short detour to stop in to  Jackson Hole Wyoming to spend a few days with my friends  and snowboard. I did one day of snowboarding at Snow King Mountain, the steepest-on-average ski slope in the country. Being that steep wasn’t really the best thing for a beginner snowboarder such as myself, but it was still very fun. The view of the Grand Tetons from the top of the slopes alone was worth the cost of the lift ticket! Unfortunately our camera died, but here is a pic of that view I found on the internet.

View of Jackson Hole and the Grand Tetons from the top of Snow King slopes

Jackson seems like a really interesting place. It feels as if it’s existence is solely due to skiing, although it is also home to the countries elk preserve. There are 3 major resorts in, or right outside of Jackson. It is a quaint ski town catering to ski bums, winter sports enthusiasts, and tourists, but it also has its fair share of shops catering only to the insanely rich. We stopped into several of these upscale places just to see how the other other half live [lately known as the 1%]. There was the art gallery filled with 100k+ artwork, the leather store selling $2k+ garmets, and By Nature Gallery.

By Nature Gallery is one the most interesting stores I have ever been in. It is where I will go to burn my first million, when I have a bazillion dollars. It was full of fossils, giant geodes, woolly mammoth tusks, and dinosaur bones! You know, the kind of things that every self-respecting museum needs. A narwhal tusk (the  white spire in the middle of the picture below) was traded to the shop by Leonardo Decaprio in exchange for some other uber-rare, bizarre artifact, or atleast that is what the lady told us. 

Narwhal tusk: $18,000

Table made of a cross-section of a petrified sequoia tree:  $250,000 

Snowboarding in this get-up: Priceless

Anyway Jackson seems like a nice town especially if you like snow sports.

Christmas in Greeley, CO

To those of you who have checked and found nothing here for a very long time, I apologize. The lack of content here is partially due to lack of content in my life as well being busy and lazy. So I will catch you up on the goings on.

We didn’t make it back to the East coast this winter for any holidays, but we did decide, last minute, to  venture halfway back across the continent to Greeley Colorado to stay a few weeks with Tess’ family. When we packed up the car and went to put Sagan in, he just looked at us like, “are we really doing this again?”  It was nice to spend the holidays with her family: mom, dad, sister, niece, 2 nephews, and several dogs and cats.

The following pictures show what went on in Greeley.

So several of these probably need explanation.... We dressed Lela up as an Ewok. I found a rad snowsuit in a Greeley thrift store, which I later wore to snowboard (see future post). The others are the of the niece (Cypher) and nephews (Bastion and Chance) and aunt Tessy. We kept the kids in that dog cage for the majority of the time. : )

This is a picture of elk from a day trip we made to Estes Park.

We also took the opportunity to visit several friends in Denver, which was really great. We went to watch the Sugar Bowl at a large bar in Denver where the Hokie Alumni gather to watch games. It was fun to hang out with 100’s of other Hokie fans and alumni and interesting to see the Denver Hokie scene in comparison to what exists out here in Seattle. 

Seattle Public Library

We headed downtown to check out the main branch of the Seattle Public Library. We had seen that it was quite an amazing feat in a very cool TED Talk (video below).

The library was built in the manner of form follows function, an apparent oddity in the architectural world (which from an engineering prospective is mind blowing). It was designed through a collaborative effort of architects and engineers with the goal of enduring practicality as the future importance of the book as a form of media is unknown!

Watch the first 9.5 minutes of the video to learn all about it. If your getting bored, skip to the 2.5 minute mark and watch through minute 9.5, where they show you the library. I recommend the whole video though.

(Click the "Full Screen" button in the bottom right corner, so you can actually see the video)


In a unique, but no-brainer fashion, the Dewey Decimal system is arranged linearly, and then coiled into a spiral to fit inside the building! It is really very fascinating when you think of how the simplicity of this idea has eluded us for so long!

The library was beautiful and I am considering going there to do some work sometime.

Indoor Climbing

Our friends Michelle and Derek took us to an indoor climbing gym. They have been climbing for a while and actually met at a climbing gym and are now engaged. We have never been climbing, and we thought it would be great to give it a try. Needless to say it was awesome. It is interesting how climbing makes you sore in the strangest places: fingers, hands, forearms, and back. We have achy muscles in places where we didn’t even know we have muscles, but it was really fun, and clearly something we would like to get into.