A garden emerges…

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…

A weekend in LA

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!

Mark in Space!

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?

Dirty pictures

OK, these aren't the most exciting photos in the world, so feel free to skip straight to the next post if you don't appreciate dumper trucks or big piles of dirt.

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???

More dirt on bamboo

These will be the last posts about bamboo, honest. Two solid weekends spent picking and mattocking and digging up these nasty, evil roots have been some of the hardest gardening I've ever done. Here's a biggish clump of rhyzome fibre that I could barely lift...
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.

More good news!

This morning I got up early and took my driving test. While it wasn't exactly driving slowly around the block while demonstrating my mastery of the air-conditioning system, it wasn't a whole lot harder.

The funniest bit was the emergency stop test, which we did while stationary in the test centre car park! And I did nearly run down a crow, which are rapidly becoming my seagull-replacement avian nemeses over here.

Lots of good news!

Remember, the pumpkins never lie!
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Great election day - I spent most it in the Methodist Temple at the University of Washington, as a poll worker on the electronic voting machines (and good old paper ballots). Great fun, met loads of interesting people and just fantastic to be part of the history.


The students were SO excited - the turn-out for our eight precincts was at least double that of 2006, so we were completely swamped at times. It was a really long day too, from about 5.45am to after 10pm by the time we had packed up all the boxes and stuffed all the ballots.

Unfortunately, that meant I missed the speeches and results on TV but Karen kept me up to date with the action as it happened by texting, and I managed to get out in time to see lots of dancing in the streets. Everyone is just so up in the air - let's hope he turns our enthusiasm into some real action on the environment, economy and the wars.

A Halloween dinner party

No fancy dress, no monsters, but a little wintery chill as the clocks go back and we hunker together for warm and good food. This Daria (l), Gilles (c) and Jonathan (r), friends of Karen's, and now mine, too! Gilles supplied the camera tonight and also a wonderful tarte aux pommes. Fantastique!

My piece de resistance was a batch of acorn squash, carved as jack o'lanterns, stuffed with gruyere and cream, then baked.

Bart added beetroot to his squash to create a digustingly lurid dish we christened 'pumpkin brains'. Spooky! Trika was in attendance, too, but somehow managed to avoid being photographed. Yes, we suspect she is really a vampire, too.

Please go home, we want to spend time with our enormous porch, wonky pumpkin and pile of washing up

The Harris blogging clan expands...

....with Dad's new blog - The Photo Pundit - which went live with its first post today. Nice one!

http://www.thephotopundit.blogspot.com/

Hopefully it will become everyone's go-to blog for in-depth, photo criticism

Driveway update!

Look, no bamboo! We got the massively invasive bamboo thicket at the side of our plot cut down and hauled away. That just leaves the root system, which is a terrifyingly dense mass of root fibre, rhizome and basically pure evil. I put about six hours of backbreaking pick and spade work in over the weekend - and I'm about a quarter of the way through. We may get a digger in....

A timely story on electronic voting machines

My experiences on the Diebold AccuVote, went live on The Guardian this morning

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/03/us-election-polling-machines-obama-mccain

Halloween!

Here's my costume for a Halloween party we went to in West Seattle - it's a fake electronic voting machine, complete with a touchscreen voting menu. A bit over-complicated to be honest but everyone seemed to like it -- lots of good conversations about Tuesday's elections.

Trika was a saucy traffic cone, while Karen doubled her age to play one of the Golden Girls, with jumpsuit, blinged-up jewellry and some totally Bronx circa 1985 white trainers.

Best picture of the night! Ook!

Critical Mass on Halloween

Last Friday of the month is Critical Mass, where a bunch of cyclists get together and reclaim the streets. It was a lot of fun scooting through the city, ringing our bells, listening to music and admiring some fantastic two-wheeled costumes. Karen's hat was quite bewitching.


The pumpkins say it all - good luck for Tuesday!