Snow White

Monya was looking for a favorite old photo of Abbey today, and she found this one of the "Snow White" phase. Abbey would pretend to eat the poison apple and then fall asleep. My job, as the Seven Dwarfs, was to cover her up with the gold-lined glass case (made of gold colored ric-rac). Then her Daddy would play the part of Prince Charming, who would kiss her and wake her up.

This photo was taken on her birthday in 2005. She was wearing her brand new "Dorothy" dress from the Wizard of Oz, that Monya made for her.

Bird Songs of Western Washington

With the arrival of Spring I have been hearing lots of bird calls during my morning bike commute. There are lots of Robins, House Finches, and White-crowned Sparrows, but more exotic birds are also beginning to make themselves heard. In this past week I've heard the call of a Bewick Wren, Varied Thrush, Osprey, and a Bald Eagle.

I would like to be able to record individual bird calls, and once even attempted to build a sound amplifier that could be focused on an individual bird in the distance. The attempt was a miserable failure because it was difficult for me to shape anything into a thirty inch diameter parabolic shape.

Uncle Jim, a research physicist, helped me by demonstrating how a perfect parabolic shape could be generated using a spinning container of liquid. He told me I would need to figure out how to capture the shape. That's where it ended until recently when my friend Sasi, a chemical engineer, told me how to capture the shape of the liquid, and turn it into a solid that can be used as a template for building parabolic sound amplifiers.

What makes this especially important is that most recordings of bird calls don't sound anything like the bird you hear in your neighborhood. That's because they were recorded somewhere else, and birds have very different sounds depending on where they live.

For example, a White-crowned Sparrow in Western Washington doesn't sound anything like a White-crowned Sparrow that was recorded in Illinois. It is only vaguely similar to one that was recorded in Oregon. Even the distance between Tukwila and Bellevue is enough to make a noticeable difference in the call of these birds.

So maybe I need to begin making recordings of the Bird Songs of Western Washington.

Look, I'm a Snail!

Yesterday Monya and I watched Emma while Lief did some shopping. She was quite the handful since I was too lazy to clean up my mess before she arrived. I had to keep her attention away from some dangerous items I had left out, like wood carving knives. As usual, she found my conch shell and asked me what was inside. She didn't go for the ocean sound, so I told her a snail used to live in there.

Before I realized it, she was on her hands an knees asking me to help her put the "snail" shell on her back. Then she told me, "look, I'm a snail" and she began crawling very slowly across the floor.

Today I described all of this to Lief and told him how delightful she was. He agreed, but he said, "in small doses."

Annual Hail Storm

Last Monday, March 29, we had a violent hailstorm. I didn't realize that it was nearly an annual event until I remembered Lief's April Fool's Day prank from two years ago. That was March 31, but this year our hail storm happened on March 29.

About 1/4 inch of hail stones accumulated on the ground, and it was very noisy coming down. I took these photos while the last of the hail was still falling.

Lost

Once, when I was about four or five years old, I ran ahead of the family while we were returning from a walk through the Arboretum. I missed the turn off the trail where the car was parked and quickly found myself horribly lost. At first there was panic, then the resolve that they had gone home without me, and I would simply have to walk home alone. But that's another story. Here's what happened yesterday.

I was riding home from Bellevue on the bicycle trail when I spotted a little boy about four or five years old, on a tiny bike, going in the opposite direction. It was one of those miniature bikes with knobby fat tires and a cast iron frame weighing more than the child who was intended to ride it. I went past him and very quickly became aware that there were no adults nearby. The rascal was all alone! The memory of panic from my youthful experience made me fear for that mischievous child.

So how could I, as a total stranger, stop the straying urchin and convince him that I could help him find his parents? I had no idea who his parents were. Was he supposed to be with an older sibling? Maybe a babysitter? All I knew was he shouldn't be alone.

I needed to find a responsible adult, but I could see a long distance and there was absolutely nobody in sight. That scalawag was approaching a busy intersection filled with impatient commuters who might not even notice such a tiny child. I decided to stay with him and work something out.

I said, "Hi there, is your mom or your dad around here somewhere?"

He motioned back up the hill and said, "My mom is back there."

"Don't you think you should go back there and stay near your mom?"

"No, I want to go home."

"Where is your home?"

"Down that way," he said, pointing ahead toward the rumbling congested intersection. I began freaking out! I absolutely could not let that small fry go through the intersection alone.

"You need to be with some people who can take care of you."

"There are people at home."

I needed to give him a reason to go back. I cajoled, "Those people at home probably want your mom to be there too. I'm worried that your mom is in trouble and she needs our help. Shall we go back there and find her?"

He thought about it and replied, "My brother is with her. But he goes too slow."

"I'm certain your mom needs help and we need to go help her."

"Hey, there's my mom now!"

I looked up to see a woman on a bike coming down the trail with a frantic look on her face. Sometimes a frantic look like that can be a good sight to see and this was one of those occasions.

[The lecture from the mom is omitted here.]

I can rest in peace knowing that somewhere in the world is a toddler who did NOT get run over by a car. The little tyke will probably forget this experience. In the future he will NOT tell a story about how scared he was when he lost his mother.

Home Made Bread

Today I baked my first loaf of home made bread. The recipe came from my son James, and I watched him make this type of bread about three times before I was brave enough to try it myself. The ingredients are wheat flour, water, and salt, with olive oil and corn meal as a surface coating. It makes the most wonderful bread, and it doesn't have any dairy products in it. I ate more than half of this loaf for breakfast on Christmas morning.

Bharathanatyam

Last week my friends at the office introduced me to the traditional Indian form of dance called Bharathanatyam (bah-`rah-ta `na-tee-um). We found some photos and videos on the internet and then practiced some poses. Here is my first attempt.

The second photo shows several of us doing a difficult composite pose. I thought it might be called "a Grecian urn" but we were told by the photographer that we simply looked like sky divers.

If you're thinking it looks like we didn't get much work done that afternoon, you would be right. We were celebrating a 33rd birthday and a beta software release.

Fall Leaves

Inspired by a recent entry on BLief, I timed my trip to the office the other day such that I could travel by daylight, and take some photos of the wonderful fall leaves. I missed the best view by two days and a wind storm, so this photo shows only what is left on the trees. It's still worth capturing.

Shrimp Palak Masala

Here is a wonderful recipe that I made up, using a combination of techniques I learned from some Indian friends. You could substitute chicken or other protein for the shrimp, but then you would have to change the name of the recipe.

Ingredients
onion 1 whole fresh onion
red bell pepper 1/4 to 1/2 of a large pepper
tomato sauce 1 can (15oz)
water 1 can (15oz)
sliced almonds 1/4 cup
garlic 5 cloves chopped fine
fresh ginger root 1 tsp chopped fine

seasoning mix:
garam masala 1 tblsp
coriander powder 1 tblsp
turmeric powder 1 tblsp
red chili pepper 1 tsp

Basmati rice 2 cups
olive oil 3 tblsp
frozen shrimp 1 cup
fresh spinach (palak) 1 large bag (4 quarts)

Instructions
Chop up onion and bell pepper into medium large chunks and set aside.
Chop up garlic and ginger root and set aside.
Combine seasoning mix and set aside.
Rinse rice in cold water, repeat until rinse water is clear.
Add four cups of water to rice and bring to boil, covered, then simmer for 15 minutes (or put it in the automatic rice cooker)

Put olive oil in large (4 qt) saute frying pan and heat to saute temperature.
Saute onion, turning frequently until it begins to turn translucent.
Add tomato sauce, then add bell pepper, almonds, garlic, ginger and seasoning mix. Stir to combine the ingredients.
Rinse the frozen shrimp in cold water until ice crystals are washed off the surface, then add them to the mix in the saute pan.
Watch mixture in saute pan for boiling. When it boils, turn the heat to simmer.
Rinse and inspect the spinach.
After the saute pan mixture has boiled, add spinach and cover. Check the mixture frequently and stir the spinach into the sauce as it shrinks.
When all the spinach has shrunk and is mixed in, the sauce is ready to serve.

Serving Instructions
Spread a layer of rice on a dinner plate and add the sauce on top of the rice.

Sunrise in Bellevue

This past week we experienced the autumnal equinox of 2009. I enjoyed watching it so much that I decided to bring my camera the next day. Of course, since I had my camera the clouds obscured the sunrise. So I took time-lapse video of the clouds and waited until the next day to capture the sunrise.

The sunrise video is fairly crude, but not bad considering the camera was duct-taped to the window. The light level changes dramatically so my amateur efforts at adjusting for it are obvious.

Grape Harvest

Today, Sep 20, I picked the rest of our grapes. None of them were green, or even red. The inside of the grape is green and the skin is dark purple. They taste good when eaten fresh, but the skins are bitter and the pulp is chewy. And there are lots of big seeds in them. So we're making grape jelly out of them this year.

Lots of the grapes had already fallen off the vine to the ground. Some of them shriveled up and looked like dehydrade raisins on the vine. So this is a late harvest. I want to remember that for next year and be ready to pick them sooner.

The attached photo shows my picking setup. Each bowl like this was about 64 ounces, or one batch of jelly. I picked eight batches today and one last week, so our total harvest was 36 pounds! I read the other day that 2009 has been an exceptional year for grapes, and our vine seemed to be happy too.

I think these are Concord grapes, but I'm not absolutely certain.

Lief's New Bike

Last Sunday Lief and I went for a five hour bike ride, to break in his new bike, in endurance mode. I brought my camera so we could get some photos of his new bike, and play around with motion photography...the kind where the subject is in motion. We ended up with some rejects due to improper camera settings. Then Lief surprised me by picking out one reject that has an artistic appeal.

So here is Lief on his new bike, and me following on a cloud.

SharkBite Plumbing

Monya saw an episode of "This Old House" where they described a new type of plumbing connection. It's called "SharkBite" and it works sort of like the Chinese finger trap toy. You simply slide a pipe into the fitting and it holds. No clamps, no solder, no sweat! It works with copper, or Pex, or even PVC (not that I recommend PVC). Best of all, if you make a mistake, there's a little plastic ring you can use to disconnect it, so you can reconnect it again later. No parts are consumed in the disconnect/reconnect.

It took me a whole day to remove the iron, PVC, and Pex combination shown in the first photo. Most of that time was extracting the iron pipe from the wall. Then it took four hours of measuring and fitting to assemble the copper/SharkBite combination in the wall, and about 30 minutes to measure, cut, and assemble the Pex/SharkBite combination shown in the second photo.

SharkBite fittings are a little expensive, but they don't leak, and they snap together with a click, saving a ton of time. This assembly job would have taken me three days and a call for help from a sweat-joint expert (Dad) if I did it the old way.

The ony drawback is that SharkBite fittings do not hold the pipe rigid. So our bathtub and shower fixtures wobble. I left the wall open on the back side so I can still do something about that if I can think of how.

Bowl of Tomatoes

The other day I picked a second (or third?) batch of small but delicious tomatoes from Monya's tomato patch. It is a wonder that we got any tomatoes at all since the only thing anybody did with them was apply water. There was no pruning, no tying up, and no pest removal. We didn't apply any bug repellent or fertilizer of any kind, so I guess these are organic tomatoes. I can only credit the excellent location, in full sunshine, against a southwest facing wall.

Fashion Tennis

When I was a kid, we were lucky to have our $1.50 tennis racquets. We wore whatever we had, like cut-off jeans, on the tennis court, and we considered ourselves fortunate if we could keep the ball inside the 15 foot high fence surrounding the court.

These days, you must dress fashionably, with a color-coordinated outfit, and matching pink tennis "shoes" too. Emma shows us how it's done...guardin' the net.

Big Sister is more the action type, although she is also very fashionable. She actually reminds me of a high school girl I used to watch on the tennis court about forty-three years ago. That girl was fashionable too, with very quick reflexes.

Beach Vacation

We spent a week at the ocean during the record-breaking heat wave in the Puget Sound area. It was a mild 85 degrees for the high during mid day. The sand burned the bottoms of my bare feet, and the sun burned the tops of them. Here's a photo of all of us on that hottest day.

The boys and I dug a pit at the top edge of the surf and tried fruitlessly to drain the water out of it. We built sand towers to protect our pit from the waves, then decorated them with discarded shells from molting crabs.

The boys body-surfed in the cold waves, then needed to warm up quickly. I buried them in the hot sand.

At a remote beach that doesn't allow motorists, we found more sand dollars than we could carry. The last time I remember finding sand dollars like this was about fifty years ago.

On our last day at the beach we dug a pit that could stop a 4X4. We decorated it with a dragon, to entice some wild sandcastle-smashing vandals into the trap. We'll never know what happened to that dragon (or the pit behind it).

Kayak Paddling Again...at last!

My friend Sunil has only paddled a kayak once, many years ago. So I invited him to go paddling in mine. He was apprehensive at first. My boat is more temperamental than the typical rental kayak. I was cruel and didn't help him get right back out. That Cedar River water was very cold. In this photo, he is balancing the boat with the "ripple" technique.

No more than five minutes later, he was out in the open lake, heading for Mercer Island. Sunil encountered his first wind waves on a lake. We went aground in some gravel, and I was temporarily hung up on a sunken log. We intentionally steered away from the anchored speed boat with the sunbathing beauties aboard.

We took a break from paddling to walk around on the river delta. We checked the bottom to make sure it was sand, not mud. Six years ago I took Kevin W. out there and we came to shore with a boat load of leeches. Look ma, no leeches! Aren't waterproof cameras wonderful?

Returning to the river, Sunil was very much more confident and stable.

In fact, he was confident enough to put down the paddle and take a picture of me.

Note that my new blog header photo was taken by Sunil.

New Coat of Varnish

After about four years of procrastination, I finally put a new coat of varnish on the kayaks. Hopefully I will get a chance to use them this summer. I want to take some under water photos, in shallow salt water, of marine creatures, while paddling in the kayak.

Sticking to the Theme

From now on, this blog will revert to my Renton Kayaker theme. It may not always be kayaking, but at least it will be mine.

No more pottery, no more china, no more jewelry, no more antiques, no more furniture, and no more wedding photos.

If you would like to catch up on the above subjects, please check out Monya's new blog at http://monya-momsie.blogspot.com/

Teacher

We went to see the mermaids in their ballet recital last weekend. We met the kindergarten teacher there.