The floor project continued last night. Jason and Ariel prepped the living room with paper and chalk lines to mark where the staples will need to go in when they start laying the wood on Sunday...

This morning we woke up and noticed that some of the red chalk lines appeared a bit smudged...

Yep, you already know what I'm going to say...it's hard to see in these photos, but we definitely caught the culprits...

I know I haven't been good about posting more photos since we moved in. But in my defense, we didn't have internet for a whole week! So now I'm catching up. These first four photos are me standing in the middle of the kitchen and turning around to take photos so that you can see the whole layout all the way around. I still need to hang things on the walls, it's a work in progress. :-)

In this photo, the closed door goes down to the basement, the open doorway to the right is our foyer/front door/steps upstairs, and the open doorway to the far left leads to the garage. If you would stand in that doorway the laundry room would be the the left, powder room to the right, and garage straight ahead.

And here's the new dining room light fixture...our housewarming gift from Mom and Dad...I love it!

And I know everyone is wondering about Piper and Pippin. They've settled right in and are loving all of the extra room!

Time for bed...we'll post more photos soon!! :-)

Happy November everyone!

Here are a couple pictures from a crazy thunderstorm we had tonight...one of the first I've seen in Seattle (thunder is a very rare occurrence here, unfortunately). For about 10 minutes, the entire sky lit up this eerie red color, with several nice flashes of lightning and some thunder to go with it. I love thunderstorms, so I turned off all the lights and sat by the window to watch.

Then it started hailing.





The ground was almost coated for awhile with this little pea-sized hail, but it melted quickly in the rain. Too bad there wasn't any thundersnow!

Jerylin, Gloria and I threw a Halloween brunch for our friends this past Saturday, and made some ghoulish food to go with it.


A lox monster, with "devilish deviled eggs" in the background.


Tomato juice with lots of radish/black olive "eyeballs", some severed hands (ice), and witches' finger breadsticks in the background.

There was also a mummy quiche, but the pictures didn't turn out for that one.

Happy Halloween!

Another bad spare bedroom. The border came down in this room, but it still needs a fresh coat of paint and definitely some new carpet. If we take Ariel up on his offer to help us put in hardwood floors in the living room and dining room, then maybe we'll take some of the pink carpet from those rooms and put it in here instead of this...

Man, I have never eaten so many apples in my life!

This weekend, Stephan and I went to this lovely family-run apple orchard up in the Skagit Valley. I didn't take any pictures of the orchard since it was raining almost the whole time we were there (thank you, Seattle weather). We just decked out in our rain gear, with the expectation that we were going to get muddy and gross, so we might as well bring a change of clothes.

Even with the rain, though, the orchard was beautiful. It was surrounded on two sides by some lovely Cascade peaks, and to one other side by the creek, Jones creek, for which the orchard was named. We've been having a pretty beautiful autumn here this year, in terms of fall leaves, so the mountains were all gorgeous colors with mist inter-weaved between them. (Side note: I must be a Seattle-ite now...I'm even finding the rain pretty).

The orchard was stuffed with all sorts of apple varietals, most of which I had never seen before. The owners encourage you to pluck the apples off of the tree and taste as many as you want, and if you like what you taste, to go ahead and pick some to take home. Some of the apples were odd colors, or shapes, or textures. There were green apples that had pink flesh when you bit into them, other apples that were super juicy, and every, every apple that I tasted was perfectly crunchy. There were more flavors than I thought possible!

We picked a combination of apples that would keep well through the winter for Stephan's household, plus good eating and baking apples to use in the next two months. The ones I show here are the piddly 10lbs of apples that I came home with...in total we picked 80lbs of apples. (at $0.85 a pound, you can't go wrong).

Maybe I'll try and make an apple pie tonight :)



Addendum: I was feeling ambitious, so here's the pie:

I made some lovely whoopie pies last week--unfortunately, my lab scoffed them up before I could get a picture. So no, these are not the whoopie pies that I made (they're Bon Appetit's), but mine looked pretty similar.

I made this exact cake recipe, but I substituted a basic cream cheese filling for the maple one (I had cream cheese in the house, but no marshmallow fluff). They were actually quite tasty, and not too sweet, which was good for the people in my lab.

I know Amanda was considering making these for the holidays, so here are my thoughts on the recipe:

1. I would add extra cinnamon, it wasn't spicy enough for me. Granted, I added a little less nutmeg than the recipe calls for because I didn't have much left, but I know some of you will want to leave the nutmeg out all together. More cinnamon! Other than that, the cake was delicious. Manda, you might even be able to substitute your famous pumpkin cake recipe.

2. When you drop the cakes on the baking sheet, take a bit of extra time to make them smooth on the top and as round as you can make them. For some reason, I thought they would spread out as they baked, but they definitely do not--if anything, they puff up higher! And some of mine turned out to be weird oblong shapes, which made matching them up for pies more difficult.

3. Try and make the cakes a bit flat. They don't seem that big when you have them on the baking tray, but then once they bake, and you try and put two together....well suffice it to say that my pies posed a bit of a challenge to actually fit the pie into your mouth.

4. Lastly, invest in some parchment paper (I think Reynolds makes a pretty cheap version these days). It made the cakes just lift right off, with not even a chance of sticking or starting to make crumbs on the bottom. I thought it was great!

http://www.bonappetit.com/magazine/2009/10/pumpkin_whoopie_pies_with_maple_marshmallow_cream_filling