Bad Art

http://www.caplakesting.com/2006_catalog/de/index.htm

I think there are much better ways to achieve their "pro-life" goal than this.

If I were related to Britney in any way, I would be mortified.

Vietnam JackFruit Chips

A friend at work just returned from Vietnam and brought me a bag of JackFruit chips.

The package is printed in Vietnamese, English and Japanese.

The English reads:

Throughout the entire process in making the chips, no chemicals are added to the chips at all. The fruits and vegetables are specially processed in order to ensure that their natural flavour and goodness are retained.

These products have also a good smelling and crunchy feature which give a good taste and provide more nutritive facts, vitamin, mineral salt necessary to the organism and protecting from the extra glucoza.

The photo on the package suggests that the chips look like golden, Pop cereal colored leaves. Once out of the bag, they look more like the pigs ears made for dogs.

They taste like air-puffed banana chips and crunch loudly. They stick in my teeth, but not in a sugary candy-type way; more like a banana-chip way.

After a little research at this site http://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/jackfruit.html, I've discovered that JackFruit (which I have never heard of) is:

...Believed to be indigenous to the rain forests of the Western Ghats of India. The Jackfruit tree grows in the tropics to an enormous size, like a large eastern oak. The leaves are oblong, oval, or elliptic in form, 4 to 6 inches in length. Juvenile leaves are lobed.

This would explain my pig-lobe association!

Jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, reaching 80 pounds in weight and up to 36 inches long and 20 inches in diameter. The exterior of the compound fruit is green or yellow when ripe. The interior consists of large edible bulbs of yellow, banana-flavored flesh that encloses a smooth, oval, light-brown seed.

Banana flavored! I nailed it!

I have eaten about half the bag now, and I still like them. They are not, however complimented by Pyramid's Snowcap Ale.

Japanese Garden- Phase Two

My 24 pieces of Trex wood/plastic composite were delivered today in the center of the driveway.

Long, Heavy and almost $40 per board!

It took me 30 minutes to move them from the driveway to the backyard. The pieces are 12 feet long and weigh quite a bit. I moved them at 10 pm when I realized that the block (for the retaining wall) delivery guys wouldn't be able to access the backyard if the Trex was in the driveway. The blocks come tomorrow.

I don't remember if I mentioned this already and I'm too lazy to check my posts, but when we removed the 2x4's from the surface of our slimy deck, the wood foundation was in great condition. We decided to resurface the deck with something that will last until the end of time.

Someone Else's Deck

The news about my Trex is not blog-worthy in itself, but it is definitely a small step that will lead to the completion of my side-yard utopia.

It's time to invite my soccer pals over for some fun in the dirt. Work party!

Snowboarding in Park City

We took a long weekend and went snowboarding in Park City.

My brother was on Spring break and after he stayed in Seattle for a few days, the three of us went to SLC and met his GF who flew in from NY. You with me?

Brody in First Class

We stayed in a ski condo in Park City. It had all the comforts of home, plus a hot tub. We ate out two nights, but made breakfast and dinner one day.

Lauren Making Dinner

B and I went snowboarding the whole time, but Brody and Lauren dabbled in both boarding and tried the new, shaped skis. We all took lessons to work on our technique. Sometimes when I do something the same way for a long time, I get lazy. I wanted to improve and after we took lessons, I felt much more confident.

The snow was great. Not like what our instructor called "concrete snow" which is what he called our Seattle snow at Stevens or Snowqualmi pass. That comment actually made me feel self- conscious about our slushy frozen rain.

We went to Park City Resort to snowboard on the first day. There were no crowds and the runs were perfect for what we wanted. Brody had rented a board, so we stuck to "blue" runs. Lauren shot like a rocket down the mountain, B was faster than me and I just had fun. I worked on my turns and balance. Some of the runs flattened out between hills and we had to do what I call "cross-country snowboarding" when you haul-ass from one hill and just ride as far as you can on the flats. When you have to unclip one boot and push, that's when things get ugly.

We went to Canyons for the last two days. They had great runs as well. Our last run of the day took us 45 minutes to get from the top of the mountain to the base. I was so tired, I almost needed help getting my boots off.

Happy at Canyons

We all have racoon eyes from the windburn. My chin is peeling like I have a sunburn.

We hit the local Starbucks a couple times to refuel and connect with the outside world.

We had some good meals out. Everyone who works in Park City is a major ski bum. Our waiters all had goggle tan lines, flaky skin from being out in the wind and cold. Almost all the ski and snowboard instructors are from Australia. They come to North America for the winter and then go home to surf all summer... but now that I think of it, our winter is their summer, so I guess the go home and snowboard too.

Between the four of us, we discovered that while we paid about $100 per hour, our instructors only made $8 per hour. The best way to find and employ a happy instructor is to walk into any snowboard or sport shop and ask one of the "dudes" working there if they know of someone who can give you a lesson. You would need to offer them lift ($65 per day) plus whatever you wanted to pay them. If you offer them $10 per hour, for example, and they teach you for 2 hours, they get a free lift ticket for the entire day and make $20. If you buy the instructor lunch, you're still ahead by over $100!

The end of our story is that our plane from SLC to Denver left 2+ hours late and we missed our connection to Seattle. Everything was overbooked because of Spring Break, so the airline put us up in a hotel and gave us meal vouchers. I called my sister, who lives in Denver and we all had dinner together. It was great! This morning we caught our flight on time, despite the 6 inches of snow that had fallen the night before.

The trip successfully made me stop obsessing about my Japanese Garden. The snow was great and I got to see both my siblings.

Possibilities

Happy Birthday Emelyn!

The Ageless Wonder

Japanese Garden- Phase 1.5

My dad came over to take a look at what will be the Japanese garden... or maybe just a garden with bamboo and a Buddha statue.

After much measuring, speculation and the discovery of well-preserved wood holding our slimy deck; some alterations were made. I did my best to be adaptable, but I can be "pig headed" as B calls it.

They're Stairs of Course!

B managed to remove the top layer of the deck. My intention was to remove the whole deck structure completely, but we decided to put a composite deck on instead. We will get some "trex" this week.

This is ok by me because it will give us a place to sit and enjoy the garden, we wont have to kill ourselves removing a perfectly stable and preserved deck foundation and we wont have to remove the wood that's against the house. I don't want to know what's under it.

Progress= Goodbye Deck & Patio

I also pulled up the remainder of what was a brick patio. Our bricks are either covered with slippery moss, or they turn to powder when it freezes here. It's totally stupid. I managed to decapitate a picket while tossing bricks over the fence. Oops.

Decapitated Picket

I'll be ordering the retaining wall bricks this week for delivery next week. I have my "yard (work) party" evite written and ready to be sent, but I wont pull the trigger until I have everything prepared. As I've been told, I can be perfectionist to a fault. I just don't want to send the invitation only to find out that the bricks cant be delivered until next month.

Getting excited... back hurts from moving bricks... very much looking forward to this new, fun space!

Mystery Dinner Game

We hosted a mystery dinner game this weekend.


Everyone was assigned a character and given a booklet that revealed clues. The goal of our game was to determine who murdered Barry (who was buried) the owner of a famous winery in Napa Valley.

The unusual suspects...

Ralph Rottingrape & Marilyn Merlot

Otto Von Schnapps & Hedy Chablee

Bud Wizer, the FBI Agent

Tiny Bubbles & Papa Vito

Bonny Lass & Marilyn Merlot

Papa Vito

It turned into a drinking game anytime someone revealed motive, that they had slept with another character, or anything that sounded ridiculous.

It was a good time.

News of the Week

Brody's home from NY!


It's his first Winter break from Columbia University and he's here for a few days.

Zazzle- Personalized USPS Stamps

I'm no Oprah, but I do have a new "favorite thing."

My brother and his sweetheart sent us a package with a photo of my brother on the postage stamp! Inside the package was a set of stamps with a photo of our dog!

www.Zazzle.com lets you customize real stamps that you can send through the mail.

I was messing around on their website tonight and I made one with a cute photo of B and his mom, which I'll send to her and another one with my best buddy and her sig. other. They are huge Seahawks fans, so I made one of them at the NFC Champ game. They'll love it!

It costs $15 for about 20, 39 cent stamps.

Good-bye Brothel

Something spooked the Asian ladies next door.

They walked out of their lease and now they're gone. Will their sexually frustrated clients come nocking on my door?

Fortunately for them, they had nothing to move out of that house.

I will miss them.

Japanese Garden- Phase 1

After getting $6,000 + quotes from two different landscapers for a couple versions of my Japanese Garden, I quit obsessing. It's not going to happen.

But I'm stubborn. And my yard looks like a wasteland.

I decided to reevaluate my project and rather than rely on landscapers, I called for reinforcements. My dad has every power tool in the universe and he makes retaining walls, gardens, greenhouse foundations and patios. He's retired and always working on something. I figured that because he is so busy, he wouldn't have time to help me with my project, but at least he could offer advice.

I went up to visit him last weekend and showed him some of my obsessively mapped plans. He made my retaining wall and Japanese garden sound like a weekend project and he and his wife offered to help me build it.

Renewed Vigor!!

So, I called around to get the blocks I want and gave my measurements. My next job is to order the blocks for the walls.

If I can have the blocks when I want them (in 2 weeks) it means that this weekend I have to:
deconstruct the existing deck on the side-yard
remove the rest of the red brick patio
remove the fence where the new wall will go
create a solution for my dog, since she's losing her back yard for a bit.

I also need to:
order gravel
create window wells with blocks for the basement windows
get some PVC piping for the future hot tub (pipe dream- pun intended)
move the dinosaur eggs (big rocks) from the back of the yard to the front yard

It goes like this. I have the blocks and gravel delivered one week, and then I plan a "work party" and my soccer team comes over, my dad and his wife come over and in two days, I have no money, my back hurts so bad I can't even play soccer the next Monday, but my walls are up and I can play in the garden all summer.

Later I will need to add a fence again to block road noise and get some clean dirt trucked in, plant some palm trees, potted bamboo, post my freaky little statuaries, plant moss and happy grasses, put a patio down...

I can't get no sleep. I'm such a nerd I just think about my garden all the time.

It's been fun to plan, but it will be more fun if I talk to the brick guys tomorrow, they have what I want in stock, they'll deliver it for free and it's 50% off.

Ha ha ha. We'll see.

Of course there's more, but I'll leave it for the pictures.

I already asked my soccer pals if they would help my with this project. I offered pizza and beer. I feel bad asking them, but if they don't want to come, they don't have to. If they do come they will get the pleasure that comes from starting and completing a substantial project in two days. Plus, I will be forever in their debt. And there's the pizza and beer.

I have to remember to ask them to bring tools. Shovels, work gloves...

See? I'm obsessive! I could write on this all night. But then, I wouldn't get to dream.