So the guys get a little tape to cover up but nothing for the women, hmmm

Is it just me or is this kinda creepily intrusive?  The photos seem obscene and yet this is your body at the airport.

Remember long ago when no one even cared if your name on your paper ticket matched anything?  No I.D. was necessary, nope, all anyone cared about was you being on time for your flight.  Then it became necessary to show some sort of I.D.  Later well, please if you don’t mind and it is entirely optional, remove your shoes then removing shoes, belts, jewelry, barrettes, watches… became mandatory.  And since I have always looked like a terrorist, I was always shuffled off for the once over while Andrew sailed on through because frisking a middle aged white gal was keeping this world safe!

And don’t you even think about complaining because if you say or do anything that ticks the TSA off you will end up in the frisking line for sure and  could end up in jail for life.

So now we get to be stripped naked before some very qualified agent.  But not to worry the agents will all be guffawing and gawking off in a private room.  Yes, that is supposed to bring you some comfort; they won’t be staring at your naked body right in front of you, they will be staring at you in the privacy of their little room.  Happy thought that.  And don’t even believe they destroy the photos as promised; ’cause I’m wondering, if they destroy all the photos immediately, why the heck-o is it so easy to pull a few off the world wide web??  “The Transportation Security Administration has promised not to store or transmit nude images of airline passengers made by whole-body scanners, but when it asked manufacturers to submit bids for such machines, it required that the scanners have exactly those capabilities, according to agency documents obtained in a lawsuit.

So… to visit my new grandson, I have to mentally gear up for this kind of treatment for the privilege of getting on a plane.  Andrew has been listening to me for a full week ranting on about this country being soooo stupid that we have let this sort of thing happen.

And our response?  Well, if it keeps us safe.  Like sheep to the slaughter.  Baaaa.

A couple weeks ago Tim had a job down in Miami Beach so I flew down there Thanksgiving day for about a week to hang out too.  It was a relaxing, wonderful escape from the rain and cold of DC.  With it’s backdrop of art-deco architecture, Miami has really fashioned itself as a design capitol and has a thriving art scene where empty warehouses used to be.  And did I mention $$$?  I was amazed (once again) by flagrant display of wealth– Bentley’s line the sidewalks in Miami like BMW’s do in DC.

As I was taking one last peruse of the Michelangelo exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, Matthias was off in a room building a tower of blocks to reach to heaven.

There in a corner of the room where the window runs floor to ceiling sitting on a chair absolutely absorbed with the city life right below her was Taite.  When I asked what she was doing she just kept staring and said, “There is so much going on out there it is hard to keep up with it all.”  Right across the street was a flashing neon pink sign that read, “Lusty Ladies” and she commented, “And I have seen a lot of women going in there.”

There is something about the city that apart from the ‘Lusty Ladies’ is so appealing to me.  The shops in a city that are so specific, like a shop that sells nothing but costume jewelry I mean, how many people are needing to purchase a piece of costume jewelry on a daily basis? or cupcakes and they can manage to be snooty about it, like, ‘you cheapskate you are taking that on a napkin instead of paying the extra for our super fancy box-to-go’ or a store that sells rubber stamps, that’s it rubber stamps and they manage to sell enough to pay the rent and pay the staff!

There is so much commerce going on that people can really hone a skill and succeed and even be all in your face about a flippin’ cupcake if they want.  I actually love the city for that, the whole attitude thing.

You can just see Taite off of Matthias's shoulder just staring away below her.

Who knew this place even existed?  I had read about Dumbarten Oaks and have wanted to go there since I discovered the gardens are free to tour in the fall and winter.  Finally, this past Saturday we actually went and I was amazed that such a place could hide, tucked back in the Georgetown neighborhood.  The estate consists of hundreds of acres which, in the middle of DC, makes it a novelty alone.  Walking around the “Byzantine” gardens with their fountains, swimming pool, terraced levels, and gazing out into the distance without a single building cluttering up the landscape, a person can feel miles away from the city– a little bit like Alice in Wonderland.  But walk out the front gate, leave the garden walls, and there’s Georgetown, crowded and bustling as always.  The pictures are stock ones as I didn’t expect to be so impressed and forgot my camera at home.  I plan to take a friend’s family photos here though, so I should be able to post more soon.

A lovely lady I work with was nice enough to give me this Filipino recipe using a bean I had never run across before, mung beans.  Apparently they are a great source of protein and eating them with rice provides all the essential amino acids, for those of you who care about that sort of thing.  Finding these elusive little beans required an adventure to Uwajimaya, the Asian market in the International District, where I also was inspired to make fresh spring rolls as a side.  This was a verbally relayed recipe (I had to ask her to repeat it to me about 5 times before I remembered it, and she patiently did) and so the amounts of ingredients are very much up to your imagination and tastes.  But definitely be generous with the garlic and ginger.  

• About a cup of Mung Beans, soaked in a bowl of water for 8 or so hours
• 3/4 cup brown rice
• Garlic (lots), roughly chopped
• Olive oil
• one large onion
• About a pound of prawns (or pork, but who wants pork instead of prawns?)
• Generous portion fresh ginger root
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Fresh spinach

Boil the beans for about 20 min til tender.  Cook the rice (per instruction, I always wing it with rice and generally get it somewhere close to right).  Set aside.  In a large pan heat the olive oil til the garlic sizzles when you put it in.  brown the garlic lightly then throw in the onions and cook lightly, keeping the pan nice and hot.  Throw in the prawns/pork and fry quickly at high heat until cooked through.  While the protein is cooking, put in a lot of fresh grated ginger, salt and pepper.  Throw in the cooked mung beans and rice and add a little water or chicken broth if it looks a little dry.  Right before you are ready to eat throw in the spinach and let it cook just a little bit before serving.  Serve alongside fresh spring rolls with a plum sauce and sweet chile sauce.

Oh, and for anyone who knows the answer to the title of this post, please let me know.  It really doesn’t make sense.

For the long weekend in September Tim and I decided on a whim to go down to Ocracoke, North Carolina.  We left at 2am to avoid traffic and by the time we arrived at the ferry 7 1/2 hours later, I was falling asleep and very glad I wasn’t driving.  We spent three days camping, fishing, riding our bikes all over it, eating seafood, laying on the beach, and spending a good deal of time at our favorite little coffee shop on the island.  It rained the night before we left and our tent and bedding was pretty soaked, but other than that the trip went off without a hitch.  I read “Cheaper by the Dozen” out-loud to pass the time on the ride home since Tim has never read it.  It was a wonderful get-away.

Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraging him to speed up the experimental work in nuclear chain reactions to construct bombs- extremely powerful bombs, and it couldn’t be uranium; it was too heavy and in poor supply in the United States.  A reactor was necessary to produce plutonium necessary for the atomic bomb.  World War II was raging and Einstein had a solution the president needed to hear about.

Thus began the construction of the B Reactor, built in secret and in a hurry. A secret on a monumental scale, 51,000 employees worked on the project in the middle of nowhere north of Richland, Washington.

It was just amazing that a secret of that magnitude could remain a secret.  The logistics of keeping all those employees fed and housed in the middle of nowhere was astounding; eight mess halls the size of football fields served daily, 120 tons of potatoes daily, 9,600 pounds of onions, 8,000 pounds of coffee, 250,000 pounds of meat were used in one week, 7,200 pies for one meal.

With amazing speed, especially for government work, the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor was completed on September 26, 1944 in just eleven months with the blueprints showing up for the project after it began operating!

The B Reactor caused America to emerge from World War II as a nuclear power and a world leader and changed the global balance of power for all time.  The reactor produced the plutonium necessary for Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and the Trinity bomb detonated in Alamogordo, New Mexico and arguably played a key role in ending World War II

Just one year ago the B Reactor was designated as a National Historic Landmark, the highest designation in the United States for historic properties.

The tours of the reactor are free but they are overwhelmingly popular filling within minutes of being available and you must be 18 or older to go on the tour.  The drive out and back to the site plus the tour takes about 4 hours.  This amazing bit of history is right here in my backyard!

This past weekend I was invited to go with some girlfriends to New York City.  We stayed in a friend’s plush pad while her parents were away.  The place was crazy!  A huge apartment in the West Village….

….with a great roof-top you can get to through a skylight.

Looking across the Hudson to Hoboken at night.

The girl whose place we were staying at is involved in various community organizing activities around NYC.  She helped put together this farmer’s market right below the projects which employs local kids and accepts food stamps.  It was started with the hope of providing healthy options for the low-income folks from the projects as well as employment/ training for the kids who run it.  At this point all the produce comes from upstate New York, but soon they’d like to start an urban garden so the kids can see the project through from start to finish, get their hands dirty, and become even more invested in what they’re doing.

 In the Meatpacking District there’s this cool warehouse called Chelsea Market just chocked full of artsy little shops and bakeries.

Years ago when was really into experimenting with bread baking I came upon this book in our little library in Sunnyside called Amy’s bread.  For the first time in my life I discovered the secret to making a baguette– the really good kind with a thick crust and chewy crumb.  I learned about sponges and autolyse and everything else that goes into artisan bread-baking.  So enthralled was I with this book that I asked for it for my birthday and mom managed to find beautiful copy of it even though it was out of print.  That was probably 12 years ago.  Imagine my surprise on stumbling upon the Amy’s Bread shop that led to this book!

Very close to the Chelsea Market is a “park” called High Line– its actually more like a walking area elevated above the city with plants and trees growing on it.  It’s a re-use of the space from the old train tracks in the Meatpacking District that used to carry carcasses from the factories.  These sun chairs are built onto the old tracks with wheels on the bottom so you can shove them together to form a wide bench or move them apart into single lounges.

Washington Park

For our final night, Sarah made us reservations at The Spice Market, a restaurant that serves all kinds of Asian “street food” (although admittedly, everything I tried was a lot more gourmet than anything I saw on the streets in Asia).  For some reason we were given a private room with with couches lining the walls.  The food is served on little plates that you share around so you get to try everything!  It was top notch!

Sunday we took the subway up town and went to Redeemer Presbyterian, a wonderful, faithful church in NYC and heard a sermon preached by Tim Keller on David and Bathsheba.  I’d listened to several sermons by him on tape and had always wanted to visit, so it was the perfect end to a really great trip.

Yvette the adventurer

Almost ready... blackberry picking is on the list for later this week!

Going under Montlake bridge is kind of a bizarre experience, you can see the underside of all the cars overhead!

Going from Moscow ID to Seattle was like being brought from a desert wasteland to a lush rainforest in terms of entertaining diversions.  In Moscow, if you wanted to ‘do something’ it meant you were going to go to one of the movie theaters, the one in Moscow or, if you were feeling a little adventurous, you went all the way to Pullman.  In Seattle, for the price of a movie ticket you can do any variety of things and one of my latest adventures was to Agua Verde, a great little paddle club and Mexican restaurant near the U district.  It’s a low-key little place on Boat Street and for an hourly fee you can rent a kayak, double or single and paddle around Lake Union, Lake Washington or a couple out of the way spots nearby.  I had had Agua Verde on my list for a while so this Monday, despite the drizzle, my boyfriend Jason (who had shown up for a surprise visit that morning!), my friend and partner on many of my Seattle adventures, Yvette and I headed down and rented some kayaks.  They came complete with “skirts” to keep any rogue waves out of the kayak and undersized little vests that sort of swallow you if you don’t keep your eye on them.  Safety first.  We hit the open lake and  opted for the arboretum tour, a great choice I must say.  And all that paddling around definitely works up your appetite for some great Mexican food and a margarita… I recommend the mahi-mahi fish tacos!

http://www.aguaverde.com/

If you drive north from DC and keep going until you are in the middle of no-where, then go a little further to where the power lines end, the roads turn to gravel and on every side you are surrounded by trees, you’ll reach Kettle Creek State Park.  That’s where I was this past weekend.

We left on Friday a little before rush-hour, our truck headed north like a determined bee pushing through the swarm that envelopes the capital that time every day, each mile taking us further from the hive, further from the din and chaos until eventually we were speeding down quiet roads with the sun starting to set.  Our pick-up was piled with gear for the weekend, a cooler stuffed with food,  fishing rods hanging out the back, a canoe and kayak strapped on top.  We had four people crammed into the cab singing country songs at the top of our lungs for the five and a half hour trip.

Lock Haven marks the last blink of cell phone reception.  If you go another 30 miles you reach Renovo which is the last town on the way.  From there you wind upwards on little roads that amble all over the mountain in different, intersecting directions with names like Sugar Camp, Kettle Creek, Spicewood.  Set a little ways off one of these roads is our cabin– a place Tim’s parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents and cousins have been going for decades.  There’s no electricity and the only “running water” is a spring just below his grandfather’s camp that constantly pumps out clear, cold water.

It was pitch black when we arrived.  The first thing Tim did was to turn on the gas tank outside and light the lamps inside.  The cabin appeared exactly the same as when I last visited 2 years ago.  There’s always a funny, un-lived-in  smell when you first open the door.  Downstairs there are three upholstered chairs– relics from 1960, a gas stove, two sinks that drain directly to the underside of the house.  The floor had been swept clean and the dining table sat anxiously with all it’s chairs resting upside-down on top of it, awaiting the next visitors.  Red and white checkered curtains, the only hint of decoration in the cabin, hang around each window.  Upstairs there are three double-bed sized bunks and a very worn-out oriental rug.  I had forgotten how cozy it was with the gas lamps glowing.

We each made up our bed upstairs, I think the guys may have decided to smoke a cigar on the front porch, and shortly after we went to bed.

In the morning Tim and Stephen got up early to try to get a little shooting in (although they found nothing to shoot at), breakfast was a very relaxed affair and took all morning followed by a trip down the mountain to Kettle Creek to do some fishing.  Mari-Scarlett and I sunbathed on the beach along the reservoir drinking wine and eating Sunchips.  Eventually we decided to take a canoe trip down the river– Stephen in his kayak and Mari-Scarlett enthroned between Tim and I on a lawn chair set on the bottom of the boat.  Three and a half miles and several cliff-jumps later, we beached the boats and Tim and Stephen hitch-hiked back to the truck.

That evening after dinner we decided to head to the Green Lantern– a local bar in Renovo with about 12 pick-up trucks parked outside, a juke-box and pool table inside and a sign promising “Happy Hour: 25 cents off all drinks”.  Tim played the classic new-comer’s game of pool, missing everything and sinking the white ball repeatedly to begin with, then winning the game with 5 shots in a row, sometimes sinking two balls at a time.  Someone put lipstick on the guy and a big zero on the forehead of the girl who lost.  We didn’t exactly close the place down, but we left late after making friends with everyone, two rounds of drinks and several spontaneous sing-alongs to the jukebox.

The next day after shooting targets and clay pigeons off the front porch we loaded up, swept out the cabin, and headed south following the river back to the hive.