Christmas Day

What's wrong with this picture? No, the car is not illegally parked. Note how dark it is, it's not even 7am yet. Hint: This was taken on Christmas morning. We were tempted to resuce the tree if it were still there when we got home.

Before it was even "bright and early" we went to Nile's work to water all the plants on display before we opened the door at 10am.

This is one of the plants on display. There are a lot of blooming flowers in the bromilliad house.

These are the two cats at Nile's work. They eat in separate rooms because Ivan, the fatter cat, would steal some of the food from Frank, the fat cat. Here is Ivan wishing he had more food. We tried fixing Ivan's "green-eye" problem in the photo, but the red-eye function just made it worse. There are more pictures of Ivan and Frank at ShopCat.com.

This is Ivan's bed. The bed is made of Spanish moss. Spanish moss is a rootless plant that gets its nutrience from the air and water that lands directly on it. Nile waters his bed (only when he's not sitting on it) so that it stays alive. Yes. The bed is alive.

The wasabi plants we got at the beginning of the summer are doing really well now. Thank you David!

This is a pitcher plant with a pitcher. Notice how the pitcher comes out of the end of the leaf, not off a stem. Matt was baffled.

They have a lot of orchids. This one is a cross between a "Spotted Wings" and a Voodoo Magic "Purple Potion". Matt just thought the names were funny and doesn't know anything about orchids.

While Matt was checking out the orchids, Nile was busily wattering. Today we had 300 visitors at the conservatory and they were all very nice and thankful that we were open on Christmas Day.

Christmas Eve

Tetsu came over from Bainbridge Island to watch Polar Express with us. After the movie, being a 12 year old, he was hungry and ate a s'more composed of a marshmallow, raspberry truffle chocolate, and two Christmas cookies. After the first bite he said, "This is the bomb!" Before the last bite he said, "This is too sweet. I don't think I can finish it." But he finished it anyway.

The next morning, we made Munlies. This is a Christmas tradition from Matt's dad's family. We have now successfully spread the tradition to Nile's mother and Jim. Munlies are people shaped sweet breads eaten for breakfast. This year we didn't have the traditional nuts and raisins for decorating, so we used egg white to adhere colored sugar and coconut to them.

We all decorated our own Munlies. Here is Nile with Munlie dressed up in Christmas colors.

Since it's a German tradition, Matt made his Munlie wear lederhosen and a white shirt.

We had Christmas Eve dinner at Shima, the best vegitarian sushi restaurant ever. Here is Sussy putting together our dinner.

We brought a yule log. We've attempted a yule log several times before, but we've never been able to get it to roll correctly. This is the first time we succeeded. We put the pears we poached this summer in the middle. Matt did the decorations with help from Tetsu.

Dinner was phenomenal! Here is Nile chowing down.

Holidays

We opened our presents today for two reasons. One, because Nile is going to have to work on the 25th, and two, because we couldn't wait any longer. We look sleepy because we haven't had our coffee yet.

Nile got lots of nice presents. One of which is a camel that Nile's boss gave her to get us ready for our Africa trip. She also gave Nile a journal to write in on the trip so that we'll have stories to tell when we get back.

Matt's dad gave him this knife rack which we modified slightly to hold screw drivers instead. We think this made the whale happier. We mounted it above the craft desk to motivate Matt to work on his robots more often. (See the parts on the desk.)

Before we went to see Polar Express in Imax 3D, we had a yummy "Christmas Eve" dinner. (See the Christmas candel in the background.)

Razelle called us that evening and told us that she can read the packages that Jennie sent us from Israel. We think the one on the left is a falafel mix and the one on the right is some sort of pudding. Maybe pistachio flavor? We'll keep you posted for the real answer.

Santa brought this really nifty game for Matt. You build electrical circuits. Here is a picture of Nile with her winning circuit. This is Matt's new favorite game.

Nativity Scene

Nile set up the Nativity scene. She even included the star of Bethlehem being played by an invention by Nile's family friend.

Cookie Baking Party

We had a cookie baking party this weekend. Our friends from work came and we baked and decorated a lot of cookies.

About half of the cookies were pretty traditional, but there were some that were more for fun. Here we have an evil bunny made out of an up-side-down teddy bear cookie, a red chalk outline of a skinny bear, and rudolf with a "bummer of a birth mark."





These were our favorite cookies. From the top, headed clockwise, a shooting star, planet Earth, rudolf, polar bear after eating a seal, blinky, reindeer in sheep's clothing, three wreathes. In the center is a pineapple. The cookie is cut with the wreath cutter. We thought it made an equally good pineapple.







It was also the first time we had friends from work over, so Nile called it a house warming party. Stephanie brought us this very cute goose cookie jar.

... and Giselle brought us these potted bulbs. They are doing a lot better than the ones we tried to force.

On Sunday we went to Bainbridge island. We had a rare view of the mountains in all directions. This picture is taken to the West of the Olympic Peninsula. Also visible that day were Mt. Reineer to the East and Mt. Baker to the North.

Shima is almost ready to open. The interior is pretty much complete. The gas is being hooked up on Tuesday and Sussy will be training his staff this week.

Christmas at the Conservatory

It's Christams at the Conservatory now. Nile spent days with her co-workers decorating the seasonal house for the occasion. There are hundreds of poinsettias around everything.

In the middle of everything is a gigantic Chirstmas tree. The theme this year is Victorian. It looks a little out of place with the other plants in the house, but it's still very nice. I think they did a great job. :-)

This is a closeup of the ornaments. You can also see that it's a really beautiful tree.

Patty, one of Nile's co-workers, gave a wreath making class this weekend. All of the greens were provided by the parks service and are trimmings from plants in the parks. It's the first time we've made a wreath, and we got a lot of help from Patty and Leonard.

Here is Kimberly and Patty together with the wreath that Kimberly made.

We hung our wreath up on our door. It smells really nice too.

Thanksgiving

This thanksgiving we visited our favorite family on Bainbridge Island. We made our favorite thanksgiving dish: a pork shoulder roast. This is the first time we got a shoulder instead of a loin. We brined it for 2 and a half days in salty apple cider and spices. We stuffed it with apples, dried cranberries and spices. The stuffing was the best part.

We had the dinner at Sussy's new restaurant on Bainbridge Island. The restaurant has really come together nicely, and they will be opening soon.

Guchi, pictured here, and Sussy, prepared several courses of delicious sushi to complement the feast. We had a roast turkey and our shoulder and a variety of other dishes.

Back at home we launched into our home improvement project. We dressed up like Jacko before doing the sanding. We had to sand all the puttying; this coated our entire condo in a fine layer of white dust.

After the sanding and a layer of primer, we put on the first coat of color. We chose a sky blue color that will brighten up the kitchen. We painted the ceiling and archway also to help open up the space.

After 3 days of sanding, painting, and cleaning dust up from everywhere, we have the project complete. Now we have more space to keep our larger kitchen wares, and our kitchen is much more cheery.

Some finishing touches...

This weekend we did some computer work for Sussy and Q-chan. We programmed their cash register and designed a web page. Sussy wrote this with a caligraphy pen and we digitized it.

This is the new countertop in the restaurant. It is really beautiful wood. These are its natural colors and pattern.

Here is Guchi mopping the floor with stain. They are using a special persimmon extract which is traditional for finishing wood in Japan.

After working all day Guchi and Teta enjoying dinner at home. It was a very productive weekend, and we think they will be able to open soon. :-)

Our Chandelier

We did something with our chandelier. We cleaned the crystal and only put about half of it back up. It looks a lot cleaner now.

Bye-bye Takashi

Takashi visited us from Japan. We had a fantastic, productive, but exhausting time.

We took takashi to the airport to say goodbye this morning.

Takashi got this pepper wreath from Pike Place Market as a gift, but couldn't fit it into his luggage, so he left it with us.

We already miss you, Takashi!

Something to fix.

We have these pointless, empty boxes above our cabinents in our kitchen that would be a great place to store pots that we don't use often and our canning. When they put the cabinents in they thought it would be a good idea to contine it up to the ceiling, but we disagree.

With Takashi's guidence and help we were able to get this started. We cut a hole in the box.

It turned out that, as we suspected, there was no structural reason for that little wall to be there so we decided to go ahead and rip it out.

The ceiling inside the box turned out to be original plaster, not dry wall. This is very crubly and a big chunk of it came down when we tore the wall out. The kitchen ceiling is drywall but doesn't continue into the box, so we needed to fill the space with plywood.

Takashi used a bunch of neat tricks to get this up and match the height of the ceiling in the rest of the kitchen. We'll have to finish it up by puttying a bit, sanding, and finally painting.

We're going to repaint the entire kitchen a light blue color. We almost chose a color called "Niagra Falls" for sentimental reasons, but ended up with "Skylark" instead.

We were very happy to get this off to a good start. It's going to be a lot more open once we have it all finished. :-)

Our new stove and countertop

Takashi, who agreed with us that our old stove was ready to retire, bought us a new stove. This one heats up much more quickly than our last one. The old stove would take forever to heat up, and then when it was hot, would be too hot. It took a lot of managing the controls to get reasonable performance. This new one is much more responsive.



We got the stove at Home Depot, that day it was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.



Next to our stove is a new stainless steel butcher block cart. We went to a warehouse sale that a home and garden store was having. Takashi got a pressure cooker and we got this cart. It was about 70% off of MSRP.

Trip to Anacortes

Today, after Nile bipassed a long line with her absentee ballot, Nile and Takashi went to Anacortes to investigate some properties that Anita and Jim are thinking about buying to build a house on. They surveyed 3 different lots, took lots of pictures, and Takashi gave his professional advice as a general contractor about the costs and benefits of each.



As their commission, Anita bought Nile and Takashi these new coats from REI.



Thanks Anita!

Go Sussy and Q-chan Dinner

Sussy, our friend who is opening his own restaurant came over for dinner. Takashi cooked most everything and it was a fantastic meal.


You probably recognize some of these faces from the construction photos we've posted. Here we all are in the living room. Guchi is visiting Sussy and helping him do the construction. Others in the photo are Ami-chan, Sussy, Matt, Nile, Q-chan, Tetta, and Takashi.