Slumberland

A few months ago I wrote about the lovely reflector art installed on Martin Luther King Jr Way as part of the light rail project, and was thrilled when the artist himself replied to my post. So I am very sad today to hear that Richard Elliott, the reflector artist, died recently of pancreatic cancer. He mentioned “health issues” in his comment, but I had no idea.

My childhood home, now for sale

Me, Dave, and Kurt, on the front porch of the same house, February 1988

The house I grew up in, in Lake City, is for sale. My mom sold it a few years ago to a flipper who is asking what seems to me to be an outrageous amount of money for the place. He also tore out all the rose bushes.

It’s a nice little starter home, but it’s tiny. I mean tiny. Not “spacious.” And when they say “formal dining room” on the flyer, I laugh. You see that window next to the breakfast bar? That is the “dining room”, and it was tiny when we lived there, which was before they put the breakfast bar in.

The upstairs is remodeled now, which is an improvement. It was just a little attic cubbyhole room before. I wonder if they’ve done anything about the heat, though. The upstairs room had no heat to it when we lived there. I had a space heater.

I stumbled onthis 1917 ad while browsing Google Books last night. We have old pushbutton light switches in our house, which was built in 1911, but none of them glow in the dark. I guess our “modern house is not complete.”

Many years ago I worked for the Seattle Central Community College newspaper, The City Collegian. I’m sad to see that the paper has stopped publishing, but surprised to see that budget cuts and lack of interest aren’t the reason for the shutdown. It does sound as if the paper stepped on someone’s toes.

The administration are being awfully clueless:

“For now, administrators point to other student publications as options for students who want to work as reporters. Seattle Central student government publishes an online newsletter with details of happenings on campus, Mansfield said.

“And last week, that same group of student leaders put out the first edition of a Seattle Central Zine.”

Oooh, a student government newsletter, vetted by the administration. Yeah, that’s exciting journalism.

I hope the Collegian is back operating as an independent (that is, school-sponsored but not school-controlled) entity as soon as possible.

Seattle, Broadway and Pine, last night:

In 1979, I won the Seattle city spelling championship. I went on to the regional competition (a huge one — I think there were about 180 spellers in that event that year) and did reasonably well but did not win. So no trip to Nationals for me. And that was my last spelling bee.

Until Monday night. I went to the Seattle Spelling Bee at Jillian’s. It starts out with a written round of forty words. I tied for first place in the written round. The last time I competed in a written spelling bee round was 1979, in the first round of the Seattle championships. I won that one, so, hey! I have a win streak going! At least, in written competition.

The top 12 spellers in the written test move on to the main bee. The first round words were not too bad, words like bathysphere, insuppressible, repercussion. I got the word “apocalypse.” I know the spelling, so it was just a matter of spelling it carefully and not getting lost mid-word.

Round 2, unfortunately, is when I went out. I spelled “louvar” as “luvar” and that was that. (They said it was Italian. “Luvar” seemed more Italian to me. I’ve never seen or heard this word before so all I could do was guess.) The other Round 2 words included idunit, subclavian, pupillometer, glengarry, etc. I could spell most of the other words in the round, darn it.

Round 3 had tougher words: caimatillo, saurophagous, and… hoedown? Wow. One speller got a major gift with that one.

Round 4 was the final round: eisegesis, teetotum, stremmatograph. The guy who spelled eisegesis won.

I finished 6th. Grr. Next time I will do better. And I do think there will be a next time. It was fun! I won a $5 gift certificate to Blue Highway Games by winning one of the mini-games.

A few weeks ago I posted about my homemade cheese experiment to use up excess milk. This week I had an unusual amount of extra milk to get rid of — a whole half gallon! Well, Halloween is coming up and so my thoughts turned to sweets… and found the perfect way to use up a lot of milk, simply. Dulce de leche is easy, if not quick, and has only four ingredients: milk, sugar, a bit of vanilla, and a bit of baking soda.

I basically used Alton Brown’s recipe, with a little inspiration from this one as well. I cooked it for about three hours and ended up with this lovely thick sauce. I had it today drizzled over bananas, and in coffee, and on oatmeal.

I think I need to give the rest away or I may regret it. I am not sure I need the sugar overload. But wow, it’s good.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working pretty hard (along with Jason) on a new project, and this time it’s not knitting or anything like that. It’s the Beacon Hill Blog. If you’re at all interested in Seattle neighborhood goings-on, check it out.

And if not, here’s a knitting status photo from a few days ago:

Perhaps I’ll finish the hoodie by November after all.

Some of my neighbors may have wondered why we were outside on the patio last week mixing a white powder with liquid, then setting it aside with a thermometer to measure its temperature, then periodically coming back outside and saying things like “nope, it’s still 125 degrees! Not ready yet!”

Honestly, we were doing nothing nefarious. We were only making soap. And one of the basic steps involves lye. Roughly, it works like this: you mix the lye with water, then eventually, when all ingredients are the right temperature, you mix it with fats (olive oil and palm oil, with a bit of soy oil, in this case). Then after some stirring, you put it in a mold. The eventual result is what you see in this picture: soap!

The soap pictured here is the soap we made last week. Dark brown is chocolate-orange, light-brown is oatmeal cookie, pink is cherry cola, and the creamy color is unscented, to be used to make hand-milled soap later. The saponification process, when done right, eventually gets rid of the irritating lye. But it takes a while for the soap to cure to the point where it is mild enough. We still need to wait 3-4 more weeks to use this soap. You can handle it just fine at this stage, though, without needing gloves as we did the night we made it.

For the last few years (except last year) a few of us have gotten together to make batches of soap like this, both for Christmas gift giving and for personal use. It’s much nicer than grocery store soap; it’s very mild once it’s cured, and of course, you can use any scent you like. (I like food scents, myself.)

I recommend it; it’s kind of nice to make your own soap. The only thing is, lye has gotten harder to find these days. This time we got it from a soapmaking supplier. I used to buy it at the Red Apple.

1967 Seattle Transit Plan map image posted by afiler.

In 1968, Seattle had a chance to vote in a rapid transit system, as seen in the map here. The Forward Thrust package of propositions contained a variety of civic improvement initiatives, many of which passed (one brought us the late and not-so-lamented Kingdome), but the transit system got only 50.8% Yes votes–and required a supermajority of 60% to pass.

In 1970, it was put back in front of the voters, but failed amid “Boeing Bust”-era recession fears. The large amount of federal money ($881 million dollars) secured for the project went instead to Atlanta, where they used it to build the MARTA system.

In retrospect, of course, this was probably one of the stupidest voter decisions ever made in this region. Can you imagine how different Seattle would be today if the routes shown on the map pictured here existed? By now we could have been spending the money to expand it to Everett and Tacoma, and adding more in-city routes; instead, we are creating a minimal line, and the expansions being planned are nowhere near as useful as they ought to be. (No stops between Roosevelt and Northgate? Only one stop between downtown and the U-District? And the University station way down at Husky Stadium instead of near the Ave? We need to build this anyway, but it’s going to be decades before it’s a really good in-city system, at this rate. It’s frustrating.)

Now we have the chance to vote again to build and expand rapid transit here, and as in 1970, people fear a deepening recession. Will people vote yes, or will it fail and kill transit expansion for another 40 years? I may not live long enough to see a decent rail system here.

(Found via comments on Seattle Transit Blog.)

This article on Food Photography for Bloggers is actually really useful for good blog photography in general — it doesn’t have to be food, though a couple of the tips are food-related. I especially liked the idea about the painted backdrops. I think some of these will be good for knitting photography.

This morning, in London, 150 copies of a rather unusual newspaper were distributed to commuters. The Manual is “the first hand-made newspaper in the UK”–a four page paper, entirely drawn and written by hand, then silk-screened in a numbered, limited edition. The intent, say the publishers, is to “show that handmade qualities can transform newspapers from ‘junk’ to collectable,” and to demonstrate the power and value of the tactile qualities of ink and paper. They hope to find sponsorship to continue to publish, but if not, they say they’ve enjoyed it as a one-time experience. It sounds wonderful, and I wish I could see the complete paper.

(Via The Guardian.)

I haven’t posted much about knitting lately. Mostly that is because I just haven’t gotten much knitting done, what with summer and real-life things interfering with the knitting time. But I am working on a couple of things. No new patterns just yet — I have some ideas percolating, but nothing ready to talk about or even swatch up yet.

The two newest projects I’m working on are the Lace Ribbon Scarf from Knitty (maybe half done) and the Rogue Hooded Pullover from The Girl from Auntie. (Pictured here, just beginning.)

The scarf was supposed to be my airplane and train knitting for the UK trip, but I didn’t get very much done. It’s a very easy pattern, though, and very portable. I have it memorized now, so if I need to take knitting somewhere, I can just grab that.

Rogue is another story. It’s also easy (so far), but it’s a 19 page pattern, and there are charts to follow, and so this will be “at home” knitting for now. It’s going to be really cool when done. And warm too, I hope. It has Celtic cables on the sides, around the hood, and around the neckline. And I intend to finish it before Thanksgiving. Let’s see if I can manage it. It’s actually relatively quick so far.

One more knitting tidbit, and it’s sort of goofy. Jason and I went out to dinner with his parents for his birthday on Monday. On the way home, I had this sudden urge to stop at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. It’s a bookstore, right? Why not?

So we stopped there right around 7pm. As we walked in, I saw that there was a group of people in the back around the stage, and someone was introducing an author. “Hmm,” I thought, “it would be funny if it was a knitting author.”

And then the woman introduced… Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the Yarn Harlot! My jaw just about dropped off my face. I guess I haven’t been keeping up with things as I should, or I would have known she was going to be here!

Because I was with Jason, who really didn’t want to spend all night there, I didn’t sit down and listen to the reading, or get an autograph. I did listen to a bit from the back, though. In Stephanie’s post about the Seattle reading she has a couple of audience pics, and if the picture was larger, you would see me standing up in the back of the room.

It’s funny, because in England (and in Germany and Austria last year!) I managed to stumble on a couple of yarn stores completely accidentally (”Let’s turn down this street — I bet it will be interesting. Oh, look, another yarn store!”), and I was telling Jason that I have an inner yarn sensor. And then this Monday my sensor led me to a book reading by a knitting celeb!

No time for a long post today, but here’s another photo from the London trip: a random leaf seen on a London sidewalk, with a happy expression!

Photo by Waffle Whiffer.

While browsing Flickr this weekend, I stumbled on an amazing photostream with lots of great pop culture stuff, particularly packaging and advertising characters from the 1960s-1980s. If you grew up in that era as I did, you’ll see a lot of familiar stuff in Waffle Whiffer’s great photostream. Look and reminisce. The photo here is just one example of the fun stuff found there: a late 70s Kool-Aid package with the classic Kool-Aid design, before the envelopes got busy and over-designed. I didn’t even like Kool-Aid that much as a kid, and yet the envelope always made it look so good! Heyyyyyy Kool-Aid!