Count your blessings instead of sheep...

Over the river and through the woods...

And the Honda knows the way to carry the sleigh... 

We'll be joining a few other million people on the road today for what is becoming an annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage.  It's hard to believe that last year Maya was a tiny newborn, and now she's running around and loves to eat!  She'll be sitting at the table tucking into a turkey dinner with us.

There will be traffic, but it's good weather for driving over the mountains. Yesterday was the eighth straight day without rain in Western Washington.  It's foggy and icy in the morning and the air is getting a bit cruddy with smog, but no one can remember a dry November like this, usually the season of cold, windy storms in the Northwest.  

The probability of getting eight wet days in a row in November is about 97%.   Or to put it another way, that's just a  3% chance of having eight dry days in row.  Just another nerdy weather statistic from Cliff Mass, Great Weather Guru of the Northwest. 

Hope you you have a peaceful and restful holiday with old-fashioned blessings.  I'll try to check in with a few pictures from the other side...

Harvest Home

Our rural ancestors, with little blest,
Patient of labour when the end was rest,
Indulged the day that housed their annual grain,
With feasts, and off'rings, and a thankful strain.

Alexander Pope 
1688-1744

Harvest Home was celebrated in Great Britain long before our American Thanksgiving. It was the custom for farm-owners to provide a feast for their laborers when the harvest had been safely gathered home.  The early settlers brought the tradition to North America, and the Pilgrims held a harvest feast in 1621.  They invited 50 or so helpful native Americans, as legend has it.  The meal was lobster, venison and whole grains (deer, corn and shellfish.)


One of the best literary examples of a rural English Harvest Home is from Thomas Hardy's novel, Far From the Madding Crowd.  The main character Bathsheba hosts a harvest dinner on her farm. In the 1967 movie version starring Julie Christy, the storm that followed the party was a climatic scene.  

Harvest Home celebrations have pagan roots in the belief in the "corn mother."  Farmers thought a spirit resided in the last sheaf of grain to be harvested, and the workers beat the grain to the ground to chase it out.  In some places people wove dried blades into a corn "dolly" that was kept safe for good luck until seed-sowing. 

On Harvest Sunday in the United States and Canada, church members brought in food from the garden or farm that was distributed among the poor and senior citizens of the local community, or used to raise funds for the church or charity. 

In Bucks County Pennsylvania, fruits and vegetables were displayed along with fall flowers and sheaves of grain at a Harvest Home in 1907-- a beautiful tradition in churches and temples around the world.

A hundred years ago in Pennsylvania Dutch country, farm women brought their best home-preserved foodstuffs to share with the less fortunate.  Now we call it a food drive, and everything comes from the grocery store.

Here's some nostalgic Harvest Home pictures to kick off this long weekend of thankfulness...

Full Pull-- Movin' on up

 

How about a wine tasting with your Saturday morning pickup?  Since we were last there in September, Paul and his crew at Full Pull moved the wine business a few blocks south into a much larger and grander warehouse.  Parts of the building is still under construction, and I overheard Paul saying they planned to hold "events" at some point. We wish them luck in their new home.

In the meantime, picking up your impulse purchased wine is kind of an event in itself.

With a teriyaki lunch, the Full Pull excursion was pretty much our excitement for Saturday. I heard clinking coming from in the back room of the basement while John rearranged wine in the afternoon.  Noodles and shrimp for dinner, and then we watched the PBS Tony Bennett "Duets II" special John recorded a while back. Did you know Tony loves everyone, and everyone loves him?

On Sunday, more serious entertainment at the Symphony: Verdi's Requiem Mass, 85 minutes long, no intermission.  Four soloists, double choir and full orchestra. The extension was on the stage to accommodate everyone, so our fourth row seats became first row seats. 

It was like going to the opera and finding yourself at church, or vice versa. Verdi was not conventionally religious, but he composed the Requiem in memory of Alessandro Manzoni, an Italian man of letters. Like all his operas, the music expresses powerful emotions in the text, especially the scary Dies irae (day of wrath.) If that doesn't put the fear of God in you, nothing will.

At the time of its premiere, the Requiem was criticized by some as being too operatic in style for the religious subject matter, and female singers were not permitted to perform in Catholic Church rituals.  However, from the beginning Verdi intended to use female singers.

Verdi wrote: If I were in the good graces of the Holy Father [i.e., the Pope], I would beg him to permit—if only for this one time—that women take part in the performance of this music; but since I am not, it will fall to someone else better suited to obtain this decree.

  The second performance of the Requiem at La Scala, 1874, with Verdi conducting.

The autumn leaves...

The falling leaves
Drift by my window
The falling leaves
Of red and gold
I see your lips
The summer kisses
The sunburned hands
I used to hold
Since you went away
The days grow long
And soon I'll hear
Old winter's song
But I miss you most of all
My darling
When autumn leaves
Start to fall...

"Autumn Leaves" is one of the most beautiful popular songs ever written.  Originally it was a French song called "Les feuilles mortes" (The Dead Leaves, 1945.) The American songwriter Johnny Mercer wrote the English lyrics in 1947.  In 1950, the French singer Edith Piaf sang both the French and English versions on a radio program. Since then, it's been covered by many artists. Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra recordings are two of the best.

A physics professor estimated 60,000,000,000 (60 billion!) leaves on deciduous trees in Seattle that’ll either rot or have to be picked up. That's two million trees with leaves, times 30,000 leaves per tree.  I'm not making this up, the Seattle Times ran an article because the city council is considering regulating/banning leaf blowers.

The city parks department uses them, and so do all the landscapers in town.  They say in a few minutes you can clean up debris that would take hours with a rake.   Or more likely, blow it into the street or next door to become someone else's problem.  Then there's the noise and pollution.  The Seattle City Council considers all issues, big and small, so we'll just have to wait and see what they decide.

Cold snap

Winter Fairy

Alla Tsank

The air is suddenly cold and dry without a cloud in the sky. We're starting a stretch of clear, beautiful weather that might take us right through Thanksgiving weekend, which is unusual for the wettest month of the year in Seattle.  The temperature is only 31 this morning-- the coldest since last March.

Now is the yearly dilemma of deciding what plants to save. I brought the Donkey Tail pots inside and a couple of houseplants, but decided no heroics this winter on all that other stuff.  Usually I pile pots in the basement stairwell, then fuss and fret and cover everything with a fleece blanket each time it gets below freezing.  This gets old.  Or maybe I'm getting old? I can always buy new jasmines in the spring.  Besides, I made a vow not to plant up so many pots and baskets with annuals next year.  All that watering! Remind me of that resolution when April comes around.

The old fig tree is in its ugly, leafless stage until May.  Cleaning up the rotting day lilies and tree shoots underneath is a nasty, once-a-year job, but at least the sun is out today.  This tree was good sized 35 years ago when we moved here. I googled it, and apparently figs can live for hundreds of years. There are strangler figs in the jungle that are over 500 years old!


For all its longevity, our fig has only done two useful things-- it once held a tree house that Amanda, "Cowboy" and "Puss" liked to hang out in, and now it shades the bonsai plants in the summer.
Once again, it is covered with thousands of green figs that didn't ripen, not even in the warmest, driest Seattle summer on record.   Nope, bringing them in the house doesn't work.  

I've Been Working on the Railroad

I've been working slowly through my on-line ukulele course, up to I've Been Working on the Railroad with strumming pattern #4.  John will be happy to hear that the upcoming pattern #5 is practiced with the classic John Denver hit, Country Roads. It helps if you can sing along in tune, but come to think of it, John Denver's voice wasn't his greatest gift and look how successful he was? Besides, I've noticed ukulele players aren't a bit shy about accompanying themselves.

If you ever learned to play an instrument, you remember playing the same piece, over and over and over.  This might be tedious to the poor listener, but not the beginner.  Just one of the many revelations I've had with my new hobby.  It takes a bit of effort to sit down and practice, but once planted in front of the music stand, the time just flies by. 

Brett's on-line course helped me over a frustrating plateau, and I've made a few modest breakthroughs.  I'm also getting a crush on young Brett, who smiles back so gently and encouraging on my laptop. No wonder he's such a good teacher-- he wrote the Ukulele Lessons for Dummies book! He learned to play the ukulele at the age of six from his grandfather.

I like finger-picking more than I like strumming and singing, for reasons already mentioned.  My favorite Christmas carol is Good King Wenceslas, so I was pretty excited to find Brett's easy finger-picking lesson on YouTube.  Perhaps there will be a thrilling recital at this house on Christmas Day?

Hard at play

Maya loves reading "bups."

Trick or treat!

"Children are born ready to learn. During the preschool years a child’s brain is twice as active as an adults, with trillions of connections between brain cells being made. And it is the child’s relationships and experiences during the early years that greatly influence how the brain develops."

Diane Gordon, former kindergarten teacher

The Seattle weekend report

1. Two feet of snow fell in the mountains this weekend with cold rain for us in the lowlands.  The high temperatures were only in the 40's, making for that unique Seattle winter damp chill that turns all those twinges into aches and pains. It's getting dark at 4 in the afternoon, so wine time comes a little early. And after listening to the awful weather news from the Midwest, we feel lucky.

Sinkhole near King Street

2. "Big Bertha" the giant tunnel boring machine triggered a sink hole along the waterfront. She's creeping through layers of rotting timber, dirt and assorted trash the Seattle pioneers once dumped as fill into Elliot Bay.  Soon Bertha will be passing right under the crumbling Alaska Way Viaduct, but the WDOT says they are not worried a bit, because they "reinforced" the shaky structure with underground concrete.  OK, then.

As we sat in the usual traffic jam up on the elevated viaduct this weekend trying to get back to West Seattle, I had ample time to point out all the cracks and chunks ready to fall on our heads. Anyway, Bertha is off to a slow start, and has moved only 460 feet since July 30 on her two mile underground journey to South Lake Union.

The Wheel of Smartness

3.  Seattle is now America's smartest city, according to new rankings by the business magazine Fast Company.  A wag at the Seattle Times commented that the people at the magazine never attempted to get from West Seattle to Ballard!  Still, it's more flattering than the other lists we make, most recently one ranking Seattle as 4th for traffic congestion in the nation. We're also in the top ten as one of the snobbiest cities. Oh yes, and we always make the list for "least fashionable city" but we're kind of proud of that.

Everett 777 assembly line

4. Last week the Boeing Union Machinists rejected an appalling contract extension offer that would have destroyed their benefits earned over decades of hard bargaining and sacrifice, including the pension plan. The union members are a target of scorn in some circles around here for their greedy attitude of "entitlement."  I've never been a big union fan, but I find that really hard to take.  John is a little more thick-skinned about the local media.

No one can predict the future, but despite billions of taxpayer subsidies to stay in Washington, the profitable Boeing Company (stock and executive compensation at an all time high) might be off to Texas, or South Carolina, or another right-to-work state to cobble up a grateful minimum wage workforce to build the planes we fly in. As the New York Times wrote, "the middle class dies not with a bang, but with a long, slow squeeze."

5.  After another great win, the Seahawks are currently the #1 team in the NFL. Go, Hawks! And we're blessed with (too much) good food, a cozy warm house, a healthy family, and heavily composted flower beds. Bring on the holidays.

"Hole Foods" update

I first wrote about this West Seattle project back on June 27, 2009.  For years now the abandoned construction site sat idle as bankruptcy proceedings and a legal fight ground through the courts.  It was fondly referred to as "Hole Foods" because the original development plan called for a new Whole Foods store.  As the saga continued, Whole Foods pulled out of the development plan in 2010, and announced they would look for another site in West Seattle.

"The Hole" is now an active construction site again, called Spruce West Seattle. I stopped the other day to take a picture of the massive crane.  The development will supposedly contain hundreds of apartments, retail stores, and a new L.A Fitness club. It will look something like this.

And what about Whole Foods?  Well, they're building right across the street from Spruce and plan to open in 2015. Apparently they're part of a mega project that will make Spruce West Seattle look small. 

So within a two block radius, grocery shoppers will be able to choose between Trader Joes, Whole Foods, QFC and Safeway. This gives you an idea of just how densely populated West Seattle has become.  It will be nice for people like me, who can't seem to let a day go by without shopping for food.

Have I mentioned our traffic lately?  One bridge-- and a few hundred thousand of us all trying to get to the same place at the same time.