Our mascot

"Taima" the hawk 

The big day is almost here.  What will we talk about in Seattle when football is over?

Taima made an appearance at the Superbowl last year but was grounded. By the way, there is no such bird as a "Sea Hawk." Taima is Auger Hawk (also known as the auger buzzard) native to Africa.  She lives at a bird sanctuary in Spokane, and is trained to fly out of the tunnel ahead of the players at home games.

This week, Taima is on a strict diet to get down to ideal Super Bowl weight.  The problem being the warmer weather in Phoenix, which could cause a slower flight and mess up the precise timing of the game opening. Or worse.

You never know what you're gonna see at a Seahawks game.  In November, Taima committed a personal foul and later apologized on Twitter for her unsportsmanlike behavior.

Trial and error

Hearty comfort food sounds good this time of year, doesn't it?  And I don't mean roasted carrots. Those New Year's resolutions are becoming just a hazy memory.  Ha! I made eggplant Parmesan last night, the delicious, breaded fried kind with melted cheese and red sauce on top.

We've had several meals from the pressure cooker since the pea soup.  There's a learning curve, especially for people who like to dink around with their recipes.  For example,  I should have cooked those pinto beans with salt, even though they say not to. My re-fried beans tasted flat despite all the salt I dumped on later.

Another issue is adding just the right amount of cooking liquid, especially for meat. All the meat we buy seems to contain a lot of water, diluting the seasonings under pressure and making it taste more "stewed" than braised.

Anyway, everything was fine overall, but this Korean barbecue pork fillet was outstanding. In the summer I cook these on the grill, and in the winter use the oven.  They are tricky to make because they dry out fast.  I guess it's safe to cook pork to just medium (still pink) but we like it cooked completely through and juicy.  In the pressure cooker, you don't have to worry about timing it just right.

I marinated the meat overnight in half a bottle of Korean barbecue sauce I bought somewhere.  Then I browned the chunks in the pressure cooker.

Then I browned a generous amount of onions, and added just enough sauce to reach the minimum liquid mark on the side of the pressure cooker.

Back went the meat, on went the lid, up went the pressure for 25 minutes...

And the result was, delicious.  Fork tender and moist.  John took sandwiches to work with the leftovers. Now if I can just remember where I bought that bottle of Korean barbecue sauce.

Eat your veggies

We live in an area of town where fresh, inexpensive produce is easy to find, and there are five major grocery stores within a couple of miles of home.

I bought some of these big beautiful peppers at the QFC (Kroger's) this morning, which is right across the street from my little gym, which is right underneath a Safeway grocery store.  These peppers came all the way up the west coast from Mexico, and we can still buy them for a dollar in January! Everyone along the way made a few cents I guess, or the grocery system wouldn't work.

Millions of Americans are not so lucky. A "food desert" is a geographic area where affordable and nutritious food is hard to find, at least without a car.  A rural food desert is a county where residents must drive more than 10 miles to the nearest supermarket chain, and in urban areas, one mile. Seattle actually has 17 food deserts, which really doesn't fit in with our self-image as a city of celebrity chefs and swanky neighborhood farmer's markets. 

According to King County Public Health, in 1990, just 6.2 percent of adults in King County were obese. Today, more than half are overweight and one in five are obese.

This map tells the story-- the people who most need fresh, nutritious food are not getting it. Dinner often comes from the KFC or McDonald's drive through. 

Here's a healthy recipe for a cheap and ubiquitous vegetable-- those "baby" carrots in a bag. This is easy:  melt a couple tablespoons of butter in a pan (or use olive oil) then add a small amount of brown sugar (or honey) and a dash of cinnamon and ginger.

Pour the mixture over the carrots and mix them up to coat, sprinkle with salt and then bake until they are very tender and sweet. Even if you don't especially like cooked carrots, you'll like these.

Where's the snow?

This is a view of Hurricane Ridge last week, 5,500 feet up in the Olympic Mountains. There's hardly any snow on the ground! From December to March, Hurricane Ridge is usually buried under feet of snow.

The snow pack is also below average in the Cascade Mountains. It's been a dismal ski season up there. And if we don't get some snow soon, it will be dismal season for watering the garden. The majority of our municipal water comes from snow, not rain. Please send your extra white stuff west. 

The pictures below are from a MOHAI photograph collection showing Mt. Rainier in a snowier time, circa 1910. 

The summit

 Nisqually Glacier crevasses

Summer hiking, circa 1910

Summer 2014

Is it my imagination, or are the glaciers smaller? 

The Wayback Machine

Sherman and Mr. Peabody enter the WABAC machine

A giant digital archive of the World Wide Web is collected and stored on The Wayback Machine at a company called The Internet Archive.  The name of the Wayback Machine actually came from the1960's Mr. Peabody cartoon on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

Anyway, this Web archiving project started before most of us even thought much about the Internet.  In 1996, Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian and advocate of universal access to all information, established a non-profit company called the Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine went to work, archiving every cached website it could find.  

Many people believe that once something is "on the Internet" it's there forever.  Not true.  Websites are removed, organizations and companies dissolve and their data disappears along with them.  Information is constantly being removed, changed, edited and over-written.  The Internet Archive Company allows users anywhere to see archived versions (snapshots, really) of web pages across time, even if they no longer exist.

How many web pages?
More than four hundred and thirty billion pages. That would be 20,000,000,000,000,000 bytes and counting. Twenty "petabytes" of data.

The Internet Archive Company isn't a secret server farm out on the prairie, but a grand place you can visit like a library.  Since 2009, the company headquarters have been located in San Francisco in this Greek revival building.  It was formerly a Christian Science church.  Now towers of computers are working round-the-clock on the top level.

The Wayback Machine is a robot. It crawls the entire Internet attempting to make a copy of every website it finds, every two months.  Some sites (like major newspapers) might be copied several times a day-- others much less. It isn't entirely random, because The Wayback Machine is also filled with Web pages chosen by librarians. In fact, anyone can add a webpage. There are other Internet archives out there, but the Wayback Machine is by far the biggest and the best.  If it isn't on there, it probably doesn't exist. 

Out of professional curiosity, of course I had to see if Feathers and Flowers was captured by the Wayback Machine robot.  (OK, I have a streak of narcissism.)

Searching the Wayback Machine doesn't work like Google, which uses something called "relevancy ranking."  In simple terms, that means the more popular you are, the more popular you become on Google. Subject searching isn't possible on the Internet Archive. There are over 400 billion web pages and not enough librarians in the world to do the cataloging and indexing for a "database" that large!

As far as I know, the only way to access the Internet Archive is by entering the URL of a website, in my case:
http://sue-feathersandflowers.blogspot.com/

And?

 And there it was.  Feathers and Flowers was saved four times between May 2013 and June 2014.

Let's say I decided my blog was the most unfortunate and embarrassing thing ever written. With a few strokes I could "remove" it from Google Blogger. The link would be gone, and if you searched for Feathers and Flowers you would get that familiar and annoying "page not found" message.

Now, here's the reason why the Internet Archive is beloved by researchers, litigators, governments, law enforcement, lawyers, museums, librarians, archivists, journalists, and assorted snoopy people all over the world.  Websites can be changed or deleted, but that snapshot captured by the Wayback Machine stays forever in the Internet Archive, at least as long as there is an Internet Archive.

You would think an archivist (even a mostly retired one) would know all about this, but I just learned about the Wayback Machine in the January 26th New Yorker Magazine.  For an interesting article, click HERE. 

Summer in January

The big news in Seattle this weekend? Exceptionally warm weather. Over 60 degrees and even warmer tomorrow. T-shirts and shorts in January.

The temperature map tells the story... 

And this says the rest.  Primroses and petunias for the window box tomorrow.

Hey, why worry?
It's all gonna fade.

What's for dinner?

If you have 5 minutes to spare for a smile today, here's some animation genius from the 1951 Disney movie, Alice in Wonderland. 
(No, we're having turkey tacos.) 

Blonde Brownie Day

I'm becoming that nutty lady who works in the next cubicle and keeps track of whacky holidays, then ambushes you on National Hug Day. Or maybe the one who brings in a plate of Blonde Brownies on January 22.  

"Blondies" were very popular in the 1950's.  Now, not so much. They resemble chocolate brownies, but are based on brown sugar instead of cocoa.  

I've never seen them at Starbucks or anywhere else, so if you're in the mood for an old-fashioned treat you'll have to make your own.  Here's a recipe from King Arthur Flour:

1/2 cup butter
2 cups (15 ounces) brown sugar, lightly packed
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon butterscotch or vanilla-butternut flavor, optional
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (4 ounces) King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour
3/4 cup (3 ounces) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 1/2 cups (15 ounces) chocolate, butterscotch, or cinnamon chips; toffee bits, or a combination
1 cup (4 ounces) diced pecans or walnuts

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a 9" x 13" pan. Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan. Add the brown sugar, and stir until the mixture is smooth.

Remove the pan from the heat, pour the butter-sugar mixture into a medium-sized bowl, and allow it to cool to lukewarm. Add the remaining ingredients, except the chips and nuts, stirring to combine. Fold in the chips and nuts.

Spread the mixture evenly in the pan, and bake the brownies for 30 to 35 minutes, until they're light brown on the edges and top. Remove them from the oven, loosen their edges with a table knife, and cool completely before cutting. Yield: about 2 dozen 2" squares.

How we build things in Seattle

 The Bertha "rescue" pit

Some local wags have commented that the rescue pit looks like a giant toilet. You know, the kind you throw money down?

The elevated Alaska Way viaduct has sunk more than an inch near the tunnel machine's rescue pit, and at least 20 buildings in Pioneer Square are sinking.  The state has reportedly said that the viaduct could sink another six inches total.  Now the city of Seattle has hired its own engineering consultants ($150,000) to take an independent look at the dangerous 1958 Alaskan Way Viaduct, to see whether groundwater removal and other Highway 99 tunnel work poses a "hazard."  Hazard is a much nicer word than catastrophic failure.

The tunnel digging (the most difficult part of the project) is only about one-tenth finished. They've dug 1,000 feet and have roughly 1.5 miles to go. The tunnel boring machine has been broken for over a year (they don't know why) and has to be hauled out of the pit with a crane for repair. It weighs 4 million pounds.  Costs are rising, but there's no plan to pay for cost overruns. The project is more than a year behind schedule, and officials at the highway department can't commit to a timeline for finishing the tunnel (if ever) or tearing down the viaduct.

How much more can the ground settle before they shut down the viaduct?  No one knows. And at this point, there's no plan for how 100,000 vehicles a day will be diverted onto already clogged downtown streets.

Reporting from Seattle, over and out...

Nursing then and now

Minor Hospital Nursing Class of 1910

Seattle

I had some great collections to work on at MOHAI in 2014, including a logging boot manufacturing company, some old business records from a local radio station called KIRO, a collection of historical mountaineering photographs, and of course, family scrapbooks, which are often donated to the museum.

Doing the research to find background information on a collection is the best part of writing the finding aids, and no matter how dry the subject seems at first, once you delve into the local history they are unfailingly interesting.

But since Amanda became an RN last year, I especially enjoyed working on a scrapbook put together in the 1940's by an alumnae group of nurses who attended school at Minor Hospital, one of the first hospitals established in Seattle in 1906.

In 1910, a week stay in a private room at Minor with round-the-clock nursing attention would set you back about $50.  If you had a baby, you did not hold it without a nurse looking carefully on, much less feed the baby yourself until it was time to go home.  You were in the hospital to "rest."  My, how the times have changed.

 A Minor Hospital nursing supervisor holding a baby

Minor Hospital closed in 1928, along with the nursing school, but the former graduates continued to meet for reunions until the 1950's.  During that time, they put together a detailed and elaborate scrapbook.

It's amazing that the original hospital building still exists, and looks like this today. It is owned by a Baptist Church and they are currently doing some interior renovations with no plans to tear it down.

You can click on this LINK to see the finding aid and learn more about early nursing education.  The finding aid is pretty detailed, and was time-consuming including the exact names of the students. But now their descendents might someday find great-great-granny on the internet. And perhaps come to the MOHAI archives to see this beautifully preserved scrapbook.

A class page from the scrapbook

Fun with Fissler

John has bought me many nice slave gifts over the years, but I was still surprised to get a fancy German Fissler-brand pressure cooker set this Christmas.  Several of my friends have pressure cookers and rave about them. But to be honest, I didn't really get it.

For one thing, I'm lucky I don't have to cook dinner after a long day's work, so speed isn't especially important. Plus I like slow cooking: braising, simmering, roasting, boiling. On top of that,  I seldom follow exact directions unless I'm baking. And I enjoy the tasting, poking and turning (and wine drinking) that goes along with slow stove-top cooking.  Frankly, I don't seem like an ideal candidate for a pressure cooker.

Ha!  I was wrong.  For starters, this is not your mother's pressure cooker.  It doesn't make scary noises and it's impossible to "blow up."  Say the cook had a senior moment and walked away from the stove, the pressure would release automatically before it reached a dangerous level. And there's no guesswork on when to start timing, because on Fissler two cute white rings pop up on top.

But the real test. They claim that food cooked in these pressure cookers tastes better, because the flavors and nutrients are "locked in." Some of us can still remember those big, soggy piles of over cooked vegetables and stringy meat coming out of old pressure cookers.

I've made gallons of split pea soup in my life, so that seemed like a good place to start.  That simple soup (recipe from the Dummies book) turned out tastier than any batch I've simmered for hours. Making pea soup is boring-- this was FUN and done in about 30 minutes. John went out for his walk in the rain, and came home to a fresh bowl of homemade soup. I think the pressure cooker cult has a new convert!

Go Hawks

The Seattle Seahawks logo was first designed in 1975 and has been tinkered with over the years.  Ever since, people have wondered what specific object was the design influence.  This mystery was solved fairly recently, according to the Burke Museum blog.

The original Seahawks logo designers used published art illustrations for inspiration.

Robert Bruce Inverarity’s 1950 book, Art of the Northwest Coast Indians  contains the most likely source for the Seahawks cool logo, a Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask depicting an eagle (in its closed form) with a human face inside (revealed when the mask opens when danced).

Have you heard, there's a championship game in Seattle tomorrow? 

Natonal Nothing Day

January 16th is National Nothing Day-- a special day of the year for just doing nothing. Why not? The perfect day for the procrastinators and lazy.

It was created in 1973 by newspaperman Harold Pullman Coffin, who was tired of special interest groups laying claim to the calendar.  He thought we needed a day to really focus on ourselves without distractions.  Imagine that? Back in 1973, Matt Helm and James Bond were the only ones with car phones.

Decades later, we seem incapable of doing nothing, or even just doing one thing at a time. Here's a song from simple and sweet 1975 in honor of National Nothing Day.

Seed catalogs

It's nice that old-fashioned seed companies like Burgess still exist, and some folks still have time to browse the pictures daydreaming about growing Paw Paw trees, Red Colossal Gooseberries, Luffa Sponge Vines and 200-pound prize watermelons.

Burgess always has enticing exotics like Angel Trumpets the size of trees and the Thailand Giant Elephant Ear, that might grow in places like Iowa, with rich black dirt and steamy summer nights. But Burgess would be happy to sell them to you in Montana. Although our climate is mild, there's a big refrigerator just down the road called Puget Sound and the evenings are cool here, even in the summer.  But who knows, with climate change?

Burgess still sends me their catalog each January, even though I haven't bought anything from them in years.  Some of the most invasive things I've ever planted (Hummingbird Vine, Corkscrew Willow) came from this very catalog.

But to give Burgess credit, so did our treasure of an Italian plum tree.  Helped along by global warming last summer, it produced an embarrassment of fruit that brought out the very worst in our "neighbors." But it makes you feel old when that little $5 twig you stuck in the ground "just the other day" has turned into a big, moss-covered tree.

Something from Social Security came in the mail yesterday, listing every penny I've made each year of my life,  except for some under-the-table babysitting.  I suddenly thought:  I'm in my seventh decade of life now.  That had such a heavy feel, I had to count the 7 decades out on my fingers to believe it.  But what is life anyway, except the choices we make in each present moment?

There's an old saying that goes something like this:

What is a good time to plant a tree?
20 years ago.

What is the best time to plant a tree?
Today.

Maybe I'll order a Paw-Paw. 

Amy, the amazing piglet

John works with Lori, Amy's owner, so we hear quite a bit about her amazing abilities and winsome personality. She thinks she is a dog. Amy became a local celebrity when she started dog obedience class and soon surpassed the puppies with her quick learning curve.  Lori, an experienced dog trainer, says it helps that Amy is "extremely food motivated." And of course, we know pigs are very intelligent.

Here's a link to Tacoma News Tribune story.

Tiny skaters

Nova started ice-skating lessons at the outdoor rink in Winthrop, and she was already making tiny circles the first time out.  I think she's a natural athlete, like her mamma.  When I see her moving and dancing, I could be looking at our Amanda again at the same age. Of all the gifts of being a grandma, this is perhaps the greatest.


Nova and Adelina are also learning to downhill ski.  Here they are with Adeline's daddy at the rink.
Get ready for the 2030 Winter Olympics.  Will there still be snow and a beautiful winter world when these little girls grow up?

Here's an old picture of Tohickon Creek in Bucks County from the family collection I've been organizing.  This was behind Grammy's farm by the cow pasture, and I think that's her handwriting on the bottom of the photo. There is a boy on the far right, maybe even our dad, bringing home the cows.

My brother, sister and I skated on this creek when we were the same age as Nova and Maya. We had little double-bladed skates that strapped on our boots, and I remember shuffling along while our big cousins skated circles around us and raced up and down, showing off.

Skating on the creek was so thrilling.  That's because from the cradle, all farm kids have the Fear of God put in them about the dangers of going near water, and especially WALKING ON THIN ICE!  Of course the creek was frozen solid, but I remember thinking, what if we fell through?

We also skated at a public outdoor rink in downtown Quakertown.  Our mom wore a skirt and we hung on to her hands and flopped around. I must have been very small. Everyone was dressed nicely to skate. It was the 1950's, and ladies did not wear "dungarees" in public.

Much later as teenagers in Colorado in the 1960's (definitely wearing tight dungarees) we skated on a tennis court that the mayor of Woodland Park was nice enough to flood every night with a garden hose, so we had smooth ice to flirt and horse around on. 

I adore ice-skating and not to brag, but I was fairly good once. I hope it's like riding a bicycle, because there's nothing I'd like more than taking a spin holding hands with Nova and Maya.

A tawdry little shocker

1899 original libretto cover for Tosca

We went to see Tosca yesterday afternoon at Seattle Opera. Puccini was already a big star when he wrote Tosca, and had a huge success with La Boheme the year before.  Everyone couldn't wait to see what he would do next.  It was like the next Star Wars movie coming out.

Audiences loved Tosca from the first performance.  What's not to like? Jealousy, love, violence, deception, rape, torture. One of the most depraved villains in all of opera (Scarpia) gets what's coming to him when the knife-wielding Tosca screams, "This is Tosca's kiss!" There is no middle ground in Tosca and Puccini tells it like it is. Violence is ugly. The entire opera is one big rush of action.

When Tosca first came out the critics savaged it.  One called it "three hours of noise" and another said it was a "tawdry little shocker.”  Today, Puccini's Tosca is the fifth most popular opera in the world.

Monday morning, and another long winter week stretches ahead for most of us.  I know, that sounds pretty glum.

The furnace repair man "Andrew" will cometh again today. The problem was not fixed, despite paying a hefty bill on Friday and assurances that everything was fine. The "intermittent" failure is now even more "intermittent."

Isn't it is so much better when things just out-and-out break, instead of torturing you along with false hope and frustration?  Life is opera.

Busy days

No messing around on the computer in jammies for me this morning.  The furnace repair guys were knocking at the door bright and early, and hopefully they fixed the intermittent problem with the thing coming on. Of course when the doctors arrived, it was behaving perfectly. 

Can you believe it,  I worked in the garden yesterday?  That's right-- alliums, tulips and unidentified things (weeds) are coming up fast.  In fact it seems like the growing never stopped this winter and seven yards of compost couldn't keep nature tamped down for long. 

No wonder. This past year will go down as the warmest ever on record at Sea-Tac Airport, at least since 1945, when planes started landing here and weather records were officially recorded.

There were many excited birds out in the yard which cheered me up while doing some dirty cleanup.  I like our yard because people can't see in unless they really crane their necks.  That's important living in an urban village. And the birds don't notice when you go out and work in the morning looking like a hag.

Oregon juncos, chickadees, assorted sparrows, the secretive Bewick's wren (maybe) and even Anna's Hummingbird clicking around enjoying the winter-blooming camellia.  The jay boys haven't been begging on the deck lately so maybe they're eating up the 10 pounds of peanuts they stashed.  Even the crows are fairly quiet. It's the time of year when avian thoughts turn to love.

I got in a nice trail ride this afternoon with Dolly on Belle and Spanky.  Then we talked about movies and this and that while cleaning stalls together.  A good barn friend and the pleasure of being above the foggy temperature inversion going on in Seattle this week. It was over 50 degrees out in the Cascade foothills. Almost felt like spring. I came home happy and dirty.

Tomorrow evening there's a big Seahawk game to watch on TV, and then the opera Sunday (Tosca) and dinner with our friend Candi afterwards. I better start scrubbing some of the grime off my fingernails.  Have a great weekend!

First ladies

This is a rare old photograph of Mamie Geneva Doud (1896-1979) as a girl.  Mamie married Dwight Eisenhower in 1916 when she was only 19. The young couple moved frequently between military postings around the world as he climbed the ladder to success.

Mamie Eisenhower was the First Lady from 1953-1961.  Everyone my age or older remembers her.  Maybe that's why I'm still partial to short bangs!  She was a role model for American women in a more traditional time.

Mamie was a great asset to Ike, entertaining foreign dignitaries at the White House with style and flair.  Like Jackie Kennedy, she was always beautifully groomed and loved to wear splendid designer clothes. 

She is remembered for these two quotes:

Ike runs the country, I turn the pork chops.

I had a career. His name was Ike.

New Year resolutions

I read an interesting article about "time" in the January Smithsonian Magazine. By the end of his life, Albert Einstein was convinced that linear time did not exist.  Einstein's friend Michele Besso died a few weeks before he did in 1955, and Einstein wrote to the bereaved family:

This is not important. For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.  

Today this is called the "block universe" view, meaning space and time are four-dimensional, rather than events unfolding in a linear way, as we like to think of our lives gently passing by.

This idea that time is an illusion didn't start with Einstein, but of course he had the science behind it.  In Parmenides (one of the mind-twisting Dialogs of Plato) they make the argument that there is no such thing as change, because the entire universe is the set of all movements at once. Everything that ever happened, or ever will happen, is happening simultaneously, right now.

Ha! Maybe that's why I make the same resolutions each January:

1. Be less judgmental
2. Show more gratitude
3. Stop interrupting people!
4. Lose 10 pounds
(and so on...)

Einstein's rejection of absolute time had an impact on literature.  Einstein was respected and articulate, and modern writers borrowed terms, images, and analogies from his scientific explanations.  The poet T.S. Eliot writes about time in The Four Quartets, a long, complex poem about relationship and personal redemption. I especially love these lines:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.