Mama mia!

The other morning at dawn I was sitting at my desk when Mama Raccoon strolled by the window with several babies. They were playing around like our front yard was just a nice city park. Which of course it is to them. What's more fascinating than watching animal parents with their young? 

By the way, female and male raccoons are called "sows" and "boars." Their babies are called "cubs."  A family of cubs is a "nursery" or "gaze."  All of this according to a fun elementary school chart I found on EnchantedLearning.com. 

I grabbed my camera and ran out to get a cute picture of the "gaze" but the "sow" started growling like a wolverine (female wolverines are called "angelines") so I stayed on the porch and left the raccoon "nursery" alone.

Young raccoons pester their mother for over a year before they go their own way. When I see raccoon families, mom always looks exasperated because the cubs are busy playing with each other, running off, or messing around.  She has to feed everyone plus teach them at the same time. The "boar" is long gone.

Let's see. What else is new this week?  Mama mia! We got a $400 water bill yesterday, a new personal best for us in consumption.  In Seattle, the electric utility bill compares your usage to your neighbors in order to shame you into using less. I suppose water peer pressure is next. I talked to my friend Diane across the street, and her husband had a fit because their bill was $275.   Ha! Ha! I said, you call that a water bill?

No rain since late June.  There was a little sprinkle at SeaTac on Friday, which broke the string of continuous dry days, but it wasn't enough rain to water diddley squat.

On the bright side, there's a mess of dahlias and fragrant lilies blooming right outside the bedroom window, so I told John at least we have something to show for our conspicuous consumption. Along with a few cherry tomatoes.

A good laugh

Here's a few adorable ones of Maya and Nova playing this weekend. 

"A laugh is a smile that bursts"

Rain?

Our July weather as close to perfect as anyone can remember.  Sunny and warm in the afternoons, but not too hot.  The only problem is the lack of rain-- 37 days in Seattle, and still counting.  That's the longest dry spell since 1960.  Things might change today, with a few showers finally making it over the mountains from eastern Washington.

We're headed that way to meet up with old friends in Lake Chelan tonight. Then a quick swing through Twisp on the way home for some little girl hugs and kisses. Have a great weekend!

Skunked

Bye Bye Butterfly, by Catrin Welz-Stein

I've been beating myself up this week, for making a dumb rookie mistake at MOHAI on Tuesday.  I was having a great time with the two other librarians, putting finishing touches on a finding aid I've been working on for months.

We had old Seattle business directories spread out, Internet searches going and other fun stuff pulled from the archive to help identify a series of old photographs. It was the most enjoyable primary research ever! The puzzle slowly sorted out, and I dutifully entered the new facts in my Excel spreadsheet as we went along.

And then...somehow, inexplicably...I didn't remember to SAVE CHANGES when I closed out my laptop for the day.  Bye, bye butterfly.  An afternoon of work gone. And not just my work.

Well, I'm not the first or last person to get skunked by Microsoft software. Was I just day-dreaming that Excel might have the common sense to auto-save my work?

More likely, I just wasn't in the present moment at that particular moment.  My new subscription to Mindful Magazine hasn't kicked in yet. Anyway, in front of my smart friends, I felt like Nova after she eats a licorice ice cream cone!

Well, I'll fill in the spreadsheet again next week. Facts found once can be found again, easily enough. As John said, in 100 years, who cares? I don't think I mentioned in July that MOHAI gave me their award for "library volunteer of the year" which was such nice recognition for three years of work. So I probably won't get fired :-)

There's a website I like called Tiny Buddha.  Since all of us sometimes forget to click the SAVE button, you might also enjoy this little article: "Overcoming Perfectionism, The Joy of Just OK."

Big Bertha

"Bertha" is the world's largest tunnel grinding machine, built in Japan over the past two years and shipped in pieces to Seattle where it was reassembled. Bertha is 326 feet long and weighs 7,000 tons. Seattle's controversial big dig was officially underway yesterday, as the drill started slowly moving under the Seattle waterfront, boring out a tunnel 57 feet in diameter for a stacked, four-lane highway 2 miles long. It will be the widest single bore tunnel ever built. The 3.1 billion (and counting) project will eventually replace the Alaska Way viaduct.

Sometime in October, the machine will go under the old Alaskan Way Viaduct, considered the most sensitive part of the path, running only 30 feet below viaduct pilings and past historic Pioneer Square buildings. Monitoring devices will check for ground movements of a fraction of an inch, throughout downtown.

The machine’s mouth, called the cutter head, slowly chips away at the earth, advancing about 35 feet per day. It operates like a worm, “swallowing” the dirt and passing it back to a conveyer belt that leads out of the tunnel and onto a waiting barge in Elliott Bay.  

As the “worm” wiggles its way through the earth, 206 feet below downtown at the deepest, it sloughs off concrete rings that line the tunnel. The tunnel will ultimately consist of 1,427 such rings made from more than 244,000 tons of concrete.  Not everyone appreciates the tunnel, especially Seattle environmentalists who oppose spending $3.1 billion to serve automobiles.

Closet cleaning

I was in a big snit last week trying to find something I'd stashed away in a "safe" place and then forgot where that place was.  How can this be, in such a small house? To give you an idea of just how small, I can vacuum the entire upstairs without even unplugging the machine.  Still, things go missing all the time.

Well, despite the lack of real, useful closets, there are nooks and crannies and other odd places to stash things in an old house.  Over the years all the excess stuff has filtered down to the basement, so it tuned into quite a search. Anyway, a long story short, this set off a cleaning jag and I filled four big bags for the Goodwill.  Does a person really need thirty vases? And so on. Of course I still didn't find the little thing I was looking for in the first place...

When I told John, he said, "since we're getting rid of stuff we don't use anymore, who not dump the electric ice cream maker you bought me back in the 1990's?"  That was a heavy hint to bring the thing upstairs after a decade of gathering dust, and finally make him some real homemade ice cream. After all, it's summer-- and one of the nicest ones ever in Seattle.

Being a helpful person, he quickly printed out a New York Times recipe:

Strawberry Ice Cream

1 1/4 cup strawberries, mashed
2 cups heavy cream (!)
1/3 cup sugar
pinch salt
2 tbs. vodka (I don't know why)

The instructions were simple because this recipe doesn't include eggs that have to be carefully cooked. You just bring the cream, salt and sugar to a simmer, stirring until the sugar dissolves.  Then add the vodka and chill thoroughly.  When cold, pour the mixture into the machine and add the berries, then churn according to "manufacturer's directions."  Which by some miracle, I didn't put away in a "safe" place never to be found again. 

Yum. In about 20 minutes it looked like this and tasted like Dairy Queen on steroids. This isn't some no-guilt sorbet.  But that little recipe turned into a surprising volume of ice cream, and I've been doling it out for dessert out all week.