Well, a bighorn sheep, actually. It’s an old hunting trophy ‘bagged’ by Karen’s great-grandmother, we think, and passed down the family. Possibly by force.
Now it’s got pride of place by our front door, all the better for scaring neighbourhood kids and possibly dressing up at Halloween.
It’s freezing cold, raining, you’ve got a thick head and a stomach full of rich food. What could be more tempting than a day on the water?
Karen is keen to make a Boxing Day sail an annual regular but judging by the hypothermic faces of Lauren and Kate, below, I suspect she may be disappointed.
We did have a great afternoon on Elliot Bay, though, sipping soup as we breezed out and back in record time. Surprisingly, there was no one else out on the water…
Well, we had a great Christmas Day. It started with a slightly slippery drive over to Ann and Ted’s in the Cutlass. It was raining in Seattle but still snowing heavily in Bellevue.
The Watts went crazy with gifts, and we also had our presents from the UK to open so we spent an enjoyable morning unwrapping cool stuff. Here’s me with the Harstene island cookbook (with two of Ann’s recipes inside…) and Karen with a rather tartan scarf.
Then it was home to fix some traditional English veg – roast parsnips and brussels with chestnuts – for a non-traditional Christmas dinner: paella at Laurelhurst. This is Karen’s cousins, Claire (l) and Lauren (r), looking at some old photos.
Everyone showed up for some great food and the famous white elephant gift exchange. It’s far too complicated to explain but suffice to say that luck, wiliness and gamesmanship all play a part in walking away with the particular weird thing that you have your eye on.
Here’s Joe, very happy to have snagged an old deer’s head!
Wow! Snow might be hell to travel through but our neighbourhood currently has the gentle frosting of a winter wonderland. Here’s 2223 N 44th Street:
Chippy’s under that pile of snow somewhere, and we just bought a very reasonably priced Western Hemlock to plant in the front ‘garden’ when it thaws. Until then, it’s covered in baubles.
Here’s Karen exploring a mini igloo in Gasworks Park. We took a great stroll around yesterday, slipping, sliding and sledding our way around a landscape transformed by the snow. It’s really special!
Not to forget our beautiful tree indoors. Merry Christmas everyone!
Phew, am I glad to be at home writing about this! I took a trip over to Boston just last weekend, to write a story about a flying car (more about that when it’s published maybe). Naturally, I decided to stop over a couple of nights with my old mate Bill (he played guitar at the Seattle wedding).
Cue the ‘Blizzard of 2008’ – two feet of snow and transportation chaos. Simply driving to the shops (and bar to see Bill’s eye-opening rock band The Raw) took serious logistical effort.
Unfortunately, flying home was even trickier. My flight from Logan was cancelled so I ended up spending a night in an airport before getting home – by the skin of my teeth – early Tuesday morning. I won’t underestimate American winters again.
The week after we got back, The Guardian finally published a feature featuring houses on the Monopoly board for sale. It was written way back in July as I was trying to sell 37 Vine Street.
I don’t look very happy, although Karen has a theory that the Guardian Weekend magazine never prints pictures of people smiling. You can read the whole story here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/20/family-property-monopoly-people
Before we knew it – and after a quick overnight trip up to Sheffield to see Alex and new lovely new girlfriend Aimee – it was time to say goodbye.
There was just time to pop in to see Vronc in Coulsdon before grabbing our flight home. She was looking stronger than the last time we saw her, which was great.
Spent a great morning hanging out with Em and Jess in London, doing some last-minute Christmas shopping.
We popped into the new Saatchi gallery of modern art. Crazy stuff as you’d imagine. Top pick has to be a replica of the City of London made out of dog chews.
… but not far off. On the Wednesday, we went to see Maddy’s Christmas play. She was playing a very naughty girl by the name of Tallulah. Totally out of character, of course :).
In the evening, Emma cooked up a great dinner, we spent hours trying to light the fire – and then did some silly videos with the girls.
Here’s me and two girls as they headed to school the next day. You can just see how keen they are to get off to build snowmen…
Back up to London to hang with the Pimenta-Edmunds crowd. We got to see Jeanne and John’s fantastic new house in East Finchley.
And spend some time with crazy Alessia and the most chilled-out baby in the world – Marnie.
On the Sunday night, Karen and I headed down to my old home-town to celebrate Pete’s birthday at one of our favourite restaurants – the veggie heaven that is Terre a Terre. Emma looks quite excited…
And Pete seems quite happy, too.
The next day we had a big booze up at the Basketmakers Arms with the old crew, and kipped over with Steve and Nat.
Here’s a quick round-up of our whirlwind tour of the UK in early December. We started out in Croydon, going to Jess’s traditional Christmas party on the first weekend in December – great to see her mates again, most of whom appear to pregnant.
Talking of babies, here’s a nice photo of my cousin Blaise and her daughter Emily, Emma and Maddy, and Jess in the middle.
This was at fantastic pre-Christmas Christmas party that Mum and Dad threw the next day. We had a full roast, all the trimmings, crackers (see evidence above), and even little presents. Here’s dad, Christian on the left and my cousin Toby.
Dad again – for some reason, people seem to think this photo looks a bit rude… Maddy and Tilly decorated the cake with snowmen. Snowmen, I tell you.
The day after Thanksgiving, Karen and I took Chippy down to Hartstene Island. The weather was remarkably mild and dry all weekend, so we spent most of it outdoors. Incredibly, we took about a kilo of huckleberries off this bush right in front of Raleigh’s cabin, in about fifteen minutes. We’re still eating them…
Our big project for the weekend was invasive species control – particularly the virulent Scotch Broom that smells and looks quite nice but gets everywhere. We started along the beach, where cutting it back didn’t take so long.
The real problem came with trying to burn a huge pile of wet, green, sappy vegetation. It took a good or hour, but we finally managed to stoke up a raging inferno. A very smoky and smelly business!
On the Sunday, we took Ted’s ‘yacht’ (a little metal boat with outboard) over to the shop at Boston Harbour, to pick up a lovely bit of steelhead salmon. We cooked it up that night for my old school-mate Kevin Murphy, who was down in Seattle from Vancouver for a conference. Here’s Cap’n Karen!
For America’s annual stuff-fest, we headed over to the big family get-together at Bill and Mary’s house. We started by ‘heisting’ an oil painting of Karen’s (painted by her aunt Carolyn) that they’d been looking after. This is actually another pic going up in the same space afterwards, but I love the composition.
I had the chance to meet lots of the Watts’s friends and also another cousin – Lauren – who’s been busy out winning the election for President O. And here’s us all well fed right in the middle of the meal. Karen made two stupendous pear pies from our weekly organic veg box. Trust Ted to be at the head of the table!
Check out our house in Google’s panoramic Street View service. Click on this link http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2223+N+44th+St,+Seattle,+WA+98103&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.259599,64.775391&ie=UTF8&ll=47.661023,-122.331862&spn=0.00711,0.015814&z=16&g=2223+N+44th+St,+Seattle,+WA+98103&iwloc=addr then on the Street View link under the little picture.
Now you can click anywhere in the image and drag it around to see our neighbours. Our is the grey house with the estate agent sign and bins out in front…
Well, the driveway can’t really be called a driveway anymore – it’s definitely a garden since we planted in some trees (vine maples and a Shore pine), some silal, huckleberry, Oregon grape and raspberry bushes, and a few heathers.
And then I ripped down the side gate to open up the space, and built beds around the side and back of the house as well (we’ve put some daffs and tulips in here). Finally, we sowed some grass seed and bulked up the gravel drive. And that is pretty much it until spring we think, when it should be time to plant veggies…
This is the Getty Center, a beautiful museum that hovers above the smog in the hills above LA. A wonderful location and just the most amazing collection of art too – I could have spent a whole day there.
Here’s Karen cruising through Santa Monica in our convertible Mustang – a surprisingly affordable beach necessity. Note the mist – evenings were chilly!
But the days were lovely – here’s us on our bikes by the canal. Not Amsterdam, but Venice. And not even that Venice but the American version – very cute.
A beached yacht at sunset on Manhattan Beach – complete with graffiti!
And here’s me in the muscle Mustang. All that V8 power under the hood made it feel like a real mid-life crisis!
Well not quite, but in SpaceX in Los Angeles at least – the first private space company to put a rocket into orbit. Interesting interview with Elon Musk, the guy who founded PayPal and also Tesla electric sports cars. The geeks are firmly in charge here!
I’ll post up the interview when I’ve written it. Here’s the Dragon space capsule that will take seven astronauts into space, sometime in the next couple of years. What do you reckon, have I got the right stuff?
This is the dumper truck depositing our Enviro-soil (2/3 mulch, 1/3 sand) on the old driveway.
My back is aching just looking at it.
But it proves relatively easy to shift - here's about half of it spread out over the garden, ready for planting. Now what to do with the mountain/molehill left over???
Karen's achievement couldn't even be shifted - we had to wrap it in plastic and roll it back into the hole until it was time for yard waste. It looked like the corpse of a large dog. By the time we got the last of it out, we had dug out each of the two patches down about four feet.
Here's how the ex-driveway, soon-to-be-garden looks today. We've put down the black tarp in an effort to subdue the thousands of tiny bamboo root fragments that infest the soil, but I suspect that come spring we'll have hundreds of shoots to contend with. I may have promised a final bamboo posting about five years too early...
6 cubic yards of fresh, clean, strained topsoil arrives tomorrow. That doesn't sound like much until you convert it into litres - 4587! I really must buy a wheelbarrow. And a new back.
