Dash

The first weekend in December Kennet competed in a sea kayak dash up at Deception Pass. It had been snowing in Seattle the day before and it was extremely cold up there, with intermittent snow. I took many failed photos but I like this one of him coming back in, a little over an hour later with a very respectable time. I warmed up by hiking up and around to the other side a huge hill where the main part of the pass is to get a better look, but I didn't take the camera for that part. Man is it hard to tell a bunch of boat people apart at height.

Christmas business

Here is me with my comb-over and our cute Christmas tree. We got a Norfolk Pine at City People's a week or two ago with the idea that it's the best compromise we can come up with . While I love love love a real tree, we both agree that cutting it down is a little more than we want to bite off at this point.

We made our own stockings this year, using somewhat felted sweaters. Kennet cut out the template shapes and I made some embellishments and sewed up the edges. We'll post more photos as soon as they're completely done.

Among the other Christmas business taking place around here:

• a gingerbread castle, complete with gummy bear minions
• highly technical present wrapping of all kinds
• christmas birds that now adorn our door, our tree, our wall, and every christmas card or present I'll give this year
• many other secret things I can't describe yet
  

3 more days of work and then a lovely 6 day weekend.

Photo Dump 1

This should be the first of a short series of photo dumps. Not much in the way of text, just pictures. Most of the pictures speak for themselves, or at least have little to say.

Genius

Earl Hallows Eve

Tis the Season for Cooking

Something about the cold weather is making me want to hoard baking ingredients and make things that include squash. I'll have recipes soon, but here are photos of the new stuffI tried out this weekend. Above is coconut encrusted tofu and the soup below is topped with sweet potato dumplings. It was awesome.

Treats

These are quite possibly the best homemade pumpkin muffins ever. I found the recipe here and added walnuts to it. They are extremely yummy and at least a little healthy. A lot of the oil was replaced with applesauce (I love that trick) and I put in less sugar than it calls for. I made a few today for a grad's birthday on Tuesday. The box, with cute wrapping tissue paper and ribbon is from a Martha Stewart kit on clearance at Michaels. I am loving the MS craft materials line, though I do think some of it goes a little to far in doing the work for you. But these treat boxes (and bags) are so cute.



Those blue blocks above are the quilt I'm working on for our bed. The one below is the vintage top I finally finished off. Today I put the binding on- scalloped in the same round shape you can see below, so a bit tricky. It won't look perfect, but it's on and in the end I'm glad I retained the scalloped edges. It has some great fabrics in it.