cascadian telegrams

faux hawk

Malcolm gets a ‘faux hawk’ haircut – after I wouldn’t let hm get a mohawk – 6/6/09.  He may not yet bend the ball like Beckham, but he can sure bend his hair like him!

may visitors

Susan’s sister DeAnn and her kids visited Seattle last week.  We had a great time with them!  Malcolm especially (OK, mostly) loved the “instant siblings”, and it was nice to have someone besides us to play with and entertain him for a change :). 

Oh and the weather was fabulous.  Come back any time!

Snaps are here.

toofairie times two

Malcolm got not one but two visits from the tooth fairy on Friday:  One of his front, top teeth and a bottom one.  He’ll make a great pirate.

In the immortal words of Foghorn Leghorn:  “Boy, yuh got more nuhrve than a sawh tooth!”

princess and the pea

our neighbor Judy designs sets for children’s plays (and has been doing so for around 15 years … since her kids where that age).  Her husband Doug is often beavering away at wood projects related to her stage productions in the garage off of our shared alley. 

They invited us and the Rathbuns across the street to a production of Princess and the Pea on Friday, which was great!  The middle-school kids where surprisingly good, the sets were wonderful and our kids were enchanted.  Pics are here.

garden path project weekend

man we are sore from removing 5-10 yards of fill and adding nearly 10,000 lbs of gravel, but our gravel garden path is ‘in’.

   

We have lots of lavender from the Seattle Tilth Edible Plant Sale, including Hidcote, English and Spanish varieties of different heights, plus some herbs and other herbaceous border plants for along the path.  By the time we’re done, none of the lousy grass sod we laid down last season will remain.  And not a moment too soon… it is crap.

This is quite literally ‘laying the groundwork’ for our garden but hopefully now the more fun part of adding plants begins in earnest.

more anchor tenants in the garden

after seeing Penguins I spent the rest of the day digging a big hole and planting a Coral Bark Japanese Maple along our fence.  That’s three new ‘anchor tenants’ in our garden including the ‘Everred’ Laceleaf Japanese Maple 

 

and a Hardy Kiwi to grow on the trellis over the gate.

The kiwi produces grape-sized kiwi fruit without the skin, fuzz or seeds, I’m excited to see what it produces!

Our work for the weekend is far from over though:  We have about 9000 lbs of gravel to set in for our garden path, and I’m going to pop by the Edible Plant Sale at Seattle Tilth up the road tomorrow to pick up cherry tomatoes for my friends.   I’m also on the hunt for an olive tree as I’ve read that arbequina spanish olives do OK here, and I’ve got just the spot (a sunny, western, warm concrete wall) for it!

Tree snaps from today are here.

“just smile and wave, boys, smile and wave…”

The new Humboldt Penguin Exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo up the street is pretty cool… more photos here for all of you that just can’t get enough of penguins… marching… ever marching, onwards…

happy birthday matt!

Today is my kid brother Matt’s birthday.  He was born April 29, 1966.

Matt is an interesting guy.  Of the three of us boys, he is by far the most athletic.  My older brother Dave and I enjoyed sports, but Matt excelled at every sport he tried:  Star pitcher in baseball, star striker in soccer, state champs in ice hockey.  He has terrific hand-eye coordination and reflexes.  Once when we were teenagers, I spotted the ball for him while he stood at the foul line and threw foul shots at the basketball hoop.  I want to say he sank 100 free-throws in a row, but probably I’m remembering that wrong.  It was a huge number of shots he sank, though, before he missed one.

I think his great hand-eye coordination is partially why he’s an airline pilot and captain now.  He flies 747s between LA and Japan (and other places), and before that he was a military aviator, flying blackhawks like the guys in Blackhawk Down (he was an Army Ranger as well).  All I know is, if I’m in a plane and it is going down, he’s the guy I want behind the controls.  He’ll land the thing, if it can be landed, and stay calm the entire time.

He’s extremely disciplined about exercise and such, but I don’t think he was always that way.  When we were younger kids, I saw him as a bit of a spoiled brat.  I think a transformative time for both of us was when we decided to take a bike tour from our home in New York to our summer place in Nova Scotia.  Matt was 14 at the time and I was 18.  Of course, there were no helmets and just a little preparation… we didn’t really know what we were doing.  We had a tent, sleeping bags and some tools and we set out on our crappy bikes in nearly 100-degree August heat.  Of the two of us, he had the far crappier and heavier bike so I carried most of the stuff in my panniers and rack.

Suffice to say it was nearly two weeks for us to go 500-600 miles, including a few break-downs, wheel rebuilds and extended stays in Amherst MA and Peterborough NH.  And we got lost in the Green Mountains of NH more than once, and got soaked in the rain.   We started running low on money around Amherst and were reduced to eating a can of beef stew on a sterno stove on the sidewalk at one point… in the the rain.  People gave us a wide berth like a couple of vagrants.

When we finally made it to our uncle’s place in Sanford, ME, Matt was ready to collapse.  I had to keep lying to him about how much farther it was:  “Only ten more miles to go, Matt, ten more miles” I said, even though I’d just made a wrong turn and it was actually 20 miles.  Before I could stop him, he flagged someone by the side of the road and asked how far it was to Sanford.  When he heard the truth, he just keeled over on the side of the road and lay there.  I got my uncle to come pick us up.

I like that story because I think it was a turning point for him, a skinny 14 year-old kid on a crappy bike, riding 500 miles through rain and the mountains and all.   It must’ve made him proud.  I’m –still- proud of him for doing that!  We’ve always talked about doing another bike tour.  Maybe this year :)?

Of course I have lots of other ‘Matt Stories’ but that’s one of my favorites.  Family members… feel free to add some in the comments if you like.

Happy Birthday Matt!

toward artificial life

… not the virtual or computer-kind, but the real, protein-based kind, from my Copenhagen friend (and Danish sprog skole classmate Michael):

Some press on my recent work:
"Harvard scientists have cleared a key hurdle in the creation of synthetic life, assembling a cell’s critical protein-making machinery in an advance with both practical, industrial applications and that advances the basic understanding of life’s workings.
...
Using the bacteria E. coli, Church and Research Fellow Michael Jewett extracted the bacteria’s natural ribosomes, broke them down into their constituent parts, removed the key ribosomal RNA and then synthesized the ribosomal RNA anew from molecules. "

family and bicycle rides

we’re trying to make a Sunday tradition of taking a family bicycle ride together.  Today we went out along the Burke-Gilman to the Chittenden Locks to watch the boats go through for a while.

I love going down to the Locks.  It smells of the sea, there’s stuff to engage kids there and in summer you can watch salmon climbing the fish ladder on their way back to Lake Washington.  Also it’s an easy ride along the Burke-Gilman to the Locks (the missing link from 24th Ave to the Locks is planned for the near future).  We pass both the Fremont Sunday Market and the Ballard Sunday Farmers Market along the way, and crossing the locks is a much better way to reach Magnolia and Discovery Park on a bike versus the Ballard Bridge.

Malcolm has one of those trailer-bike thingies so I tow him on these rides.  I want him to appreciate the sense of freedom you have on a bicycle… he loves it so far.

On an unrelated-family note:  It was a week/weekend for my brothers too.  My brother Matt and his wife Colleen popped into town from L.A. for some things they had going on up here this weekend so we got to see them briefly which was nice, and my brother Dave just returned safely to Oregon from a 5,000 mile motorcycle trip.  I’m glad/relieved he’s back!