little black journal

Burgers and beer and Quinn’s; lots and lots of rain; a quick trip to Snoqualmie Falls with my parents to enjoy the (wet) fall colors; a visit to Swanson’s Nursery to pick out a tree for our new backyard (backyard reveal coming soon!); and many hours spent at home enjoying the comforts of home-cooked food, time with family, and steaming mugs of tea.  Fall is good.

We took advantage of the lovely Fall weather today to get out and make the annual Schnell family trip to the pumpkin patch out in North Bend.  (This was visit #2 to this particular pumpkin patch, so I am now officially calling this an annual family tradition.)  This time, we invited several of our friends (our ‘Seattle family’), which made for an even better time.  We spent awhile wandering among the pumpkins, all in search of that one perfectly round, perfectly colored pumpkin – I told myself as we were heading to the patch that we really didn’t need more than that one perfect pumpkin.  But then again, what is a ‘perfect’ pumpkin?  Is it small or big?  Orange or white or green?  Tall and skinny or short and squat?  We couldn’t decide, and far be it from us to discriminate, so we walked away with a wagon full of ‘perfect’ pumpkins.  A nice little multi-ethnic pumpkin family.  It was such a beautiful day out there, with the sun shining and Mount Si rising up in it’s rocky glory right beside us.  Good times.

Post-pumpkin patch, we found ourselves hungry and ready to cozy up indoors, so we all headed to Brian and Nicole’s for a dumpling making party.  I had never made dumplings before, but I have never enjoyed food prep so much – it was fun to sit around the table with friends, folding yummy fillings of pork and vegetables into delicate little pot-sticker wrappers, then passing them to the men at duty by the stove.  And mmm mmm, they were delicious.  The perfect way to ‘wrap up’ a perfect fall day (pun intended).

This was one of those nothing-special but oh-so-good kind of  weekends.  No big happenings at the Schnell household, but I enjoyed the chance to hang out with friends yesterday and have a ‘me’-day today.  Shane had a late night/early morning at the office last night, so I decided to spend the morning being out-and-about, soaking in the beautiful day and letting him rest.  After church, I stopped by the Fremont Sunday market to do some wandering.  It had been awhile since I’d been to Fremont, and their Sunday street market is one of my favorites in Seattle.  I was tempted by all the home-baked and hand-stitched goodies, but I practiced restraint and walked out of there with nothing but a beautiful bouquet of fresh sunflowers.  Then I practiced indulgence when I came home and baked a batch of chocolate-dipped almond-cherry biscotti.  The rest of the day was pretty mundane, but productive – went for a run, cooked dinner, did laundry, savored a piece of the afore-mentioned biscotti…  Settling into the couch now for a little tea-time, and am going to keep my spirits high by pretending that tomorrow is NOT Monday.  How fleeting a good weekend can be…

So hard to believe that today was the last official day of summer…  The afternoon nearly slipped by us in a lazy haze of post-brunch football and naps, but around 4:00, I peeled myself from the couch, laced up my sneakers, and convinced Shane to join me on a short Sunday mini-adventure (yes, I use the word ‘adventure’ lightly).  I was itching to get out to enjoy the sun and see something new, so we headed toward Lake Washington in hopes of finding some kind of close-to-home new discovery.  There is a large community garden in Colman Park that I’d driven past a couple of times but never ventured into, so we decided to make that our destination.  And WOW.  The garden is tucked into the side of a hill, hidden from view of the lake by a large grove of trees, and as we came upon it, with the late sun just barely skimming the tops of the tallest stalks of flowers, I was enamored.  We spent nearly an hour wandering among the rows of bright pink and yellow dahlias, leafy lettuce, and hearty squash plants.  So many lovely colors and shapes and signs of life.  And it was nice to get out of the house to enjoy a leisurely stroll with Shane – it seems that lately, all of our time and energy for outdoor activities has been funneled toward jogging (with Shane training for the marathon and me trying to work off those lattes and scones that I love so much), and so I’d forgotten just how nice it feels to be able to go outside and stop to smell the roses – literally.  It’s too bad that we only just discovered this place, as things are starting to die down for the Fall and Winter, but I’ll look forward to seeing what kinds of new growth and colors Spring will bring to the garden.

We ended our day-date by sitting for awhile down near the lake, enjoying the sound of the water lapping over the rocks at the shore and the view of Mount Rainier in the distance.  It was one of those very perfect Seattle kind of afternoons – a lovely way to bid farewell to what has been an amazing summer.

Today was a good great day – a totally open bonus day to spend however I chose.  Being that cafe-sitting is one of my most favorite pastimes, I started my day with a latte at a new cafe I’ve been wanting to check out – Citizen in Lower Queen Anne.  Good coffee, cool space, but a little too restaurant-y for someone like me, who likes to feel free to linger over a latte for an hour+ without any pressure to buy something else.  I cut my stay a little short to give my table up to the breakfast-ers who were filing in.  They did have a pretty amazing-looking crepe menu, though, so I’ll head back next time I’m in the mood for a solid brunch.

Post-coffee, I headed home and picked up Shane for an 11:10 showing of 500 Days of Summer.  Did you know that movie tickets are 6 bucks before noon?  Score!  Plus, I showed up to the theater with snacks in my purse, so I was an exceptionally cheap date this morning.  The movie was really good – smartly written and well-acted with a quirky/artsy vibe to it.  Loved it.  A post-movie lunch at Panera, a round of shoe shopping to find a much-needed new pair of running shoes, and I was somehow tuckered out from this wonderfully mellow morning.  And Lord knows that my ‘perfect’ day absolutely includes a nap, and so I spent an hour on the couch dozing while Shane watched the Giants game, waking briefly for each of Uribe’s home runs (Shane just couldn’t silence his excitement).  Refreshed, I took advantage of a momentary break in the rain to get out for short run to break in my new running shoes.  An impressively good dinner of miscellaneous items we needed to use up from the fridge, a home pedicure (on the off chance that I get to bare my feet in sandals at least one more time before the chill of Fall sets in), and I’m now settling into the couch for the evening with my cup of ginger peach tea and my book.  Perfection.

I am constantly looking for new ‘Schnell Family Traditions’ that Shane and I can instate and take part in year after year.  Today I think we may have found a perfect summer ritual – we called a couple of friends, hopped in the car, and were off to do some blueberry picking.  Our destination was Bybee Nims Farm in North Bend, which was beautiful.  We wandered among the aisles between heavily-laden bushes as Mount Si loomed beneath a layer of misty clouds in the background.  Perfect.

The berries were fat and juicy – so good in fact, that for every few Shane dropped in the bucket, I caught him popping one or two in his mouth.

The darling hands of our little helper plucked the berries from the lower boughs…

We walked away with over 5 pounds of berries, at the bargain price of only 10 bucks!  We’ve been gorging ourselves on them all day – sooooo good.

Today was painfully hot in Seattle, as we reached the hottest temperature ever on record here.  Now, I lived in California’s Central Valley, so I know heat, but I also know that in California, you can usually count on coming home to an air-conditioned house.  No such luck here, so once again, we headed right back out the door once we got home from work to seek refuge from the heat.  After calling a couple of restaurants in search of AC, and visiting a couple of others, we finally found ourselves at Pyramid Brewery and promptly ordered a round of cold beers.  Sweet relief…

After dinner, we spent some time hanging out at REI, fiddling around and waiting for the sun to go down, and left the store just in time to swing by Elliott Bay to catch the last remnants of a vibrantly pink sky.

This weather has been a great incentive to get out and enjoy the city, but then again, tonight we’re sleeping on an air mattress in our living room, because it’s just two degrees cooler down here than in our upstairs bedroom.  This is what desperation feels like.  (Yes, I do know that I’m being dramatic…)

Seattle is hot, hot, hot this week, with temps approaching 100 degrees.  I feel like it’s heresy for a Seattle-ite to complain about heat, since we always seem to be complaining about the absence of sun, but we are approaching the point of unbearable-ness.  This, coupled with the fact that Shane’s dad is visiting and we’d like to show him the city, is incentive to do all we can to get out of our AC-free house in the evenings.  And so tonight we headed out to Ballard for Thai food (after calling ahead to make sure that the restaurant was air conditioned), then decided to check out the Ballard Locks.  It was a great night to be out near the water.  We watched the boats travel through the canal, oohed and ahhed over the huge salmon that were running in the fish ladders, and reveled in the feel of the cool breeze coming off the lake.  Lovely.

When Shane and I started house-hunting two and a half years ago, we kept our search radius within a 30-minute bus ride to the center of downtown Seattle.  The place we ended up buying in Columbia City met our criteria, but still, the fact that it took 25 minutes (on a good day) to commute to 4.5 miles to downtown was a little tough to stomach, considering I had been able to walk to work from our old apartment in almost half that time.  What made the bus ride a lot easier to bear was the promise that the first leg of the Seattle lightrail system would eventually run just two blocks away from our house, thereby cutting our commute time almost in half.  And finally, after enduring two and a half years of roadwork and construction and train testing, the lightrail officially opened for business on Monday and made our trek to work so much more pleasant.  A few of the pros:

-  The trains come almost three times more frequently than our bus used to come, so if we happen to just miss our train in the morning, we’ve only got a seven-minute wait to catch the next one.

-  The downtown stops for the lightrail are in the underground bus tunnel.  This is a big plus, considering Seattle sidewalk bus stops are cool and wet for eight (or more) months out of the year.  The underground tunnel is dry and well-lit – a much more pleasant place to wait on a cold winter evening.

-  The trains are so clean and modern and shiny and new!  Yes, this will last for only so long, but it’s such a step up from the bus – I hate to rip on Seattle’s bus system, since it did serve us relatively well for the last couple of years, but some of Metro’s buses are looking a little ragged.

-  It’s just so much more cool to say, “I’ve got to catch my train home” than to say you’re taking the bus.  So much more urban!

Major kudos to Seattle for taking such a huge step in improving our city’s mass transit system.  We’re finally getting on the right track (pun intended).

This weekend was proof that summertime is just around the corner, as I enjoyed: slicing into a perfectly juicy watermelon; taking in a Sunday afternoon baseball game; seeing our little front yard garden grow by the hour; drinking several glasses of chilled white wine; jogging along sparkling Lake Washington; barbecuing in the backyard with neighbors; waking up each morning and opening all the windows in the house; wearing tank tops and flip flops; reveling in the feel of sunshine on my shoulders.  ‘Tis the season for all these warm weather pleasures.

Unfortunately, ’tis also the season for busy-ness, with long hours at work and weekends spent preparing for my next licensing exam.  But I will certainly be taking time to stop and smell the spider mums…  (Flowers courtesy of Shane.)