Coolness factor

Summer is here. I know I've always wanted to have a sauna, but converting a bedroom into one wasn't my plan... yet it happened.

The bedroom window is facing west, conveniently capturing sunlight throughout the hottest part of the day. The result: when I come home from work, it's at a toasty temperature 90-95F (+32C to +35C). The best part - the room doesn't significantly cool down by bedtime. Have you ever tried sleeping in a sauna? Have you tried doing it for 8h?

Today, all too prepared to have another happy night in a furnace, I was entirely surprised by the view from the bedroom door:

Isn't that beautiful!!! It turns out that our resident superhero (Sara) had installed a window AC into the bedroom!! I have no idea how she managed to carry that 80lbs thing upstairs, but I have no complaints.

Coolness factor? The room is down to 74F (+23C). Purrfect

Polls are Fun, Right?

Viviparous Mutant Tomato

It was a regular morning. I (Sami) was tired, hungry, and the coffee was still dripping. It wasn't until I had already finished my breakfast sandwich (with tomato slices on it) when I realized there was something seriously wrong about this particular tomato... It was still alive!!

Why?

Apparently store-bought tomatoes do this sometimes. I did some research on google before posting this photo. Often a mutant gene causes the seeds to start growing inside fruit. Sometimes it happens because the tomato was harvested and taken off the vine and then kept in cold storage for a long time before being purchased and eaten.

So, there you have it. And look at the number of those sprouts! I could grow a whole tomato garden with those....

In Search of Hidden Parks

Since we haven't been geocaching much lately, I've been thinking that perhaps we should hide some of our own. This afternoon I strapped the GPSr to the handlebars of my bike and went out scouting little-known parks for future caches. I had so much fun, I ended up riding 12.6 miles.

Halfway through my trip, I stopped in the grocery store to refill my water bottle and buy a snack. I hadn't been in the Haggen before, so I decided to look around. They had an amazing selection of bulk foods and bulk candy. I noticed there were a fair amount of black candies - almost as many as you'd find in Finland. I figured I should buy some for Sami. So, I stepped closer... and saw penguin candy. Perfect for Sami.

After shopping, I continued on into some new neighborhoods. Neighborhoods full of big hills. Actually there's a hill called Sexton Mountain (not labeled on the map) that is smaller than some of the other hills I rode on. I don't quite understand how that works... anyway I had to actually get off the bike and push it up some of them.

Near Beacon Hill I found a nice pond with a family of Mallards. I sat there for a while watching the baby ducks when two families of Canadian Geese marched in. The geese are pretty brave and they swam right to the end of the pond where I was sitting. They dove and pecked and ate a few bugs or whatever it is that geese eat and climbed out of the pond. The parents marched the baby geese up a hill and across the street. Baby #10 (not shown in the street picture) had a hard time climbing the hill and his dad honked loudly at him for a while, but eventually they all made it.

I'll definitely have to take Sami back to this pond for a picnic sometime soon to watch the birds. Maybe we can also hide a small geocache near the road so other people can find this cool spot too.

Thieves in the Garden

It seems that the local birds really like the coconut fibers in our hanging baskets. When we moved and cleaned out the birdhouses we made a couple years ago, we noticed that the nests were made almost entirely out of coconut fibers. We've seen 5 or 6 different species doing it, but the Western Scrub-Jay - Aphelocoma californica seems to be the number 1 thief. Our hanging baskets are starting to look really ragged, but I have to admit it's pretty entertaining to watch.

Farmer's Market

The Beaverton farmer's market opened for the summer today. There were five or six rows of tents and a pretty large selection of veggies, fruits, bread, meats, crafts and plants. This market seemed a bit more expensive than others we've been to, but perhaps the prices will go down as more produce is available later in the season.

The market is the one place here in Oregon where you won't find dogs. According to the farmer's market website, only purse-dogs are allowed. Portland is a dog town, everyone owns dogs and they take them everywhere. There are even pubs like Lucky Lab where you can hang out and drink a beer with your dog.

There was also a band playing at the market. I didn't see them at first, and it sounded like they were a marching band... Yesterday I was sitting at home reading, and I heard a band playing. We do live just down the street from a school, but the music seemed closer than that. I looked out the window and the kids were marching up and down our street. It was kind of funny.

Later in the summer there will be tons of people playing in the Beaverton City Park Fountain. I thought I'd better get a photo of it before the weather got too warm. I also read that there will be movies shown on a big inflatable screen near the fountain later on during the summer. They're all kids movies, but there is an online survey so people can vote for their favorites.

Back from the Land of Excess

Yep... KBIS seems perfectly suited to Vegas (or vice versa). I'm talking about the Kitchen and Bath Industry show, the conference I went to earlier this week. I forget exactly how much area it covered, but I remember it was measured in acres rather than square feet. Over 1000 exhititors. I've never seen so much toilet flushing in my entire life. Or so much tile, or sinks, or ovens or cabinetry. Anything you could possibly think of relating to kitchens or baths was there. It was crazy. They gave us pedometers the first day we were there. I never managed to make mine work properly, but I asked someone else and they said they walked 13 miles in one day inside the convention center.

And back to the toilets... there were toilets with fish tanks in them, toilets that glowed in the dark, toilets with customizable logo lids, and toilets with double size "Big John" seats. If you wanted literature on a particular product, you just let the exhibitors scan the barcode on your namebadge. It was like we were all grocery items in some super-busy-super-size-supermarket.

Unfortunately photos weren't allowed in the showrooms, so I couldn't take pictures of the insanity indoors. Outside, I kept thinking I'll take some later, but I only managed to take a handful of photos during my three days there. Sami's camera doesn't take night pictures as well as mine. I didn't think about that when I decided to take his instead of mine. We realized on the plane ride home, that we never even took a picture of our little group from school. Oh well.

Enlightenment

These are the fixtures we bought at Ikea a couple weeks ago. Installing them was a bigger project than Sami expected, but we enjoyed it for the most part.

First we had to take down the ugly old fixture. It was a big frosted glass and gold colored hershey kiss shaped thing located where the left fixture now hangs.

Then we had to figure out where the projector should be mounted in order to be the desired size and cut another hole in the ceiling for the second fixture. Of course the joists were running the wrong direction so we had to get an extra long 1/2" spade bit to drill through them and fish the new wire through. This would have been easy if we could have crawled into the attic and worked on it, but this is the basement and the bedrooms are right above.

So, we got the wires all hooked up and realized the hole where the old light had been installed was bigger than the round part on the new fixture. I did a bit of taping and mudding and it looked a bit better. Sami went looking for the paint and discovered even though there are 15 cans of paint in our garage, none of them were the flat white for the ceiling. He went out for groceries and got some paint too. It's not a perfect match, but very close.

Sami hooked up the light fixtures and we moved the arms around and fixed them in place using drywall anchors. We'll still have to adjust the lamps later when we have everything set up in the room. The next step is to buy a dimmer and install it.

Weird Wet Week

It's been a really weird week. School (and the library) were closed again on Wednesday. I think some idiot hates their class and is really screwing it up for the rest of us. So, again I only got half a paycheck and I have no idea how we're going to learn everything we're supposed to for our estimating class. It's only 6 weeks and we missed two.

Then on Thursday, my Kitchen and Bath Planning class was supposed to meet at this house to see a kitchen that had been remodeled. There was an accident on the highway and I realized I'd be a few minutes late, so I called my instructor. She said don't worry - she'd just gotten a call from the homeowner saying the dog had to go in for emergency surgery and we wouldn't be able to do the tour.

Today I went first thing in the morning at 8:30 am to get my truck inspected so I could renew the plates and it failed the emissions test with three different errors. So I had to take it to the mechanic, the original quote was $1,4o0. I almost decided to junk the truck. Then I talked with them, "do you really really have to fix everything or is there just some way to pass the exam... " I know the truck has problems, but we don't drive it that much. Only when we need a truck. So in the end, I got it halfway fixed and passed the test for $500. I got to the DMV right at 5 pm and managed to sneak in the out door and pay for the registration, so it's finally done.

Oh, the wet part... the flowers are looking pretty good. I think most of the fruit flowers were killed off in the frosts a couple weeks ago, but i can see a few baby pears growing. We also got some volunteer chives. They're pretty, but I don't actually like to eat them. It's rained and hailed and sun-shined rained and hailed all week. Yesterday I stood just between the living room and dining room and watched it rain in the back yard and be sunny in the front yard. I couldn't believe it. Oregon is weird.