Colorado livin'

How is life in Colorado?

I've answered this question several dozen times in the past month, and no doubt I've given slightly different answers every time—but for those I talk to less regularly, here are some bits and pieces of how my life has changed since leaving Seattle.

From an outsider's perspective, the culture in Carbondale feels pretty similar to that of Seattle: a left-leaning community of outdoor enthusiasts, dog lovers, NPR listeners. The restaurants have vegan and gluten-free alternatives and plenty of microbrews on tap. When people ask what you do, they mean "What do you like to do on the weekends?", not "What do you for work?" Beards, Subarus and coffee dependence are prevalent; work attire is plaid flannel and jeans. The local grocery has banned plastic bags. Everyone loves Whole Foods.

So every now and then, I'm floored by some of the differences. On the pro-Colorado side...when people pass me on the sidewalk here, they look me in the eye and say, "Hi!" This happened approximately once in every 99 encounters with passersby in Seattle. I love how astoundingly warm, friendly and hospitable people are in this valley. Steve and I moved into our new home in Redstone the day of the Super Bowl, and we hadn't been unloading our Uhaul twenty minutes before a neighbor rolled up on his dog sled to offer to help us unload and invite us to his house for a Super Bowl party that evening.

Sometimes, I feel overwhelmed at how magical this place feels. If it's cloudy one day, it's pretty much guaranteed to be sunny the next day. The sky understands; we did our time, we deserve some rays. The sky in Seattle did not understand this. 

While I worried that my blog name would no longer be apt once I left my beloved Puget Sound, I do, in fact, still live in proximity to water. I live across the street from the lovely, rippling Crystal River, and a five-minute drive from an awesome natural hot springs that makes for terrific post-run soaking.

The Crystal River

On the pro-Seattle side...apparently no one here has ever heard of recycling. Not only is there no recycling pick up at our house (let alone yard waste/compost pick up!), the closest drop-off recycling center is 25+ miles away. Putting glass bottles, cardboard boxes and even banana peels in the trash can feels like nails on a chalkboard to me—yet, at some point, doesn't driving all those miles counteract the environmental benefits of recycling in the first place? We just have to be all the more mindful. 

Snowboarding is not cool here, the way I like to think it sort of was back in the Northwest. I get asked all the time, "Do you ski?!" To which I say brightly, "I snowboard!" Inevitably, the inquirer's face falls. "Oh," they say. Oi vey, the disappointment in their eyes!

The restaurant scene in town also leaves something to be desired. It's pretty hard for anywhere to compete with Seattle—but oh, I am homesick for my malai kofta from Annapurna, my phad see ew and red curry from Jamjuree and phad thai from Amazing Thai, my injera at Queen Sheba. Carbondale has decent pizza, Mexican food and all-American diner grub...but the ethnic options are sorely lacking. With that said, I really have nothing to complain about, because the eating at home is fabulous, and I'm undoubtedly saving oodles of cash not eating out anymore. 

Steve's Amazing Thai rendition. Amazing is the correct adjective to describe what is pictured here.

Teaching my body to run at altitude has been an another beast entirely, which I could ramble on about at length. I think I'm finally starting to turn the corner on what's essentially felt like a month of miserable, asthmatic slogs in the snow—but more on that in another entry. (Soon!)

Adventures in unplugging continue. I’m compelled to share the following excerpt I came across in a productivity book published in 1976. From a section called Information Overload:

“The office duplicating machine, the mimeograph, the offset press, the videotape recorder—all these and many more products of modern technology have one common goal: the production and distribution of more and more information to be absorbed by the human brain. But no one has come up with any ideas for increasing the human brain’s capacity to absorb more information. Most people are already taking in more information than they can usefully assimilate. Why multiply the input…[and] make it difficult for you to concentrate on the big picture?”

– from ‘Getting Things Done’, by Edwin C. Bliss

I must confess I have no idea what a mimeograph is—but funny how much things change, and how much they don’t change at all.

My jeans, for example, will stop wearing out rectangular holes in the right butt pocket, where my iPhone dwelled in Life Before Redstone. My internet-less evenings have afforded me swaths of free time I never imagined possible alongside a 40-hour-a-week job. Granted, this probably is also due to the fact that I went from having 30-40 friends I regularly spent time with in Seattle (thanks to the communities of REI folk, Oberlin alumni, and the Seattle Mountain Running Group) to having precisely two friends here—if you count my cat.

Then, there are things that have not changed.

The addiction to checking things, to hoping someone has reached out in some way, has not disappeared altogether. After Mt. Sopris interrupts my car radio’s reception, I spend the better part of my drive home from work fantasizing about the letters, cards or packages I might find inside our mailbox. After several weeks in our off-the-technology grid experiment, Steve and I succumbed to the lure of the modern world and got a landline in our cell-phone-receptionless new hometown—so now I wonder, too, if we've gotten any voicemails.

The frenzied checking continues.

Granted, it’s mediated. On Facebook, there are roughly 700 possibilities for people who might interact with me at any given moment. My iPhone has 217 contacts on it, at least a couple dozen of whom I’ve texted with semi-regularly.

In sharp contrast, there are exactly four people in the world who currently have our landline number, so the possibilities for voicemails are slim—“your mom or mine?!” Though a few more folks know our mailing address, the mail quietly shows up only once a day, six days a week—not 24/7 the way the Internet is incessantly alerting, notifying, pinging, poking. Back in Seattle, I’d developed the habit of checking my email first thing in the morning, on my iPhone, while still in bed…turning off my alarm clock and opening Gmail with concurrent swipes of the thumb.

FYI that’s dumb.

As I am again composing this blog entry offline at home for posting later, I am now off to look up “mimeograph” in my dictionary.

P.S. A number of you have asked me to share pictures of Redstone and our new home. As I wrote before, I hope to stop participating in the look-how-great-my-life-appears-when-I-present-it-this-certain-way-on-the-interwebs business…so just know that all these come with a necessary disclaimer to shred any perception you might have that life here is perfect: I'll reiterate the complete and utter lack of decent Thai food here. Also, because I do not have the Internet and Facebook to look at pictures of other people’s cats, I spend inordinate amounts of time taking pictures of my own. It's a pretty unglamorous life here, I promise.

Okay, now on to the good stuff:

Our street! Population 94 now.

More from our street

Looking toward Coal Basin, the snowshoeing paradise across the street from our house

Inside Coal Basin

Running up by Hanging Lake near Glenwood Springs

I generally see more deer than humans on my runs

Sunset run on the bike path near my work

Enough of that snow! Let's go inside, where it's cozy. Here's home sweet home.

Chloe knows what's up.

The day she figured out she could climb up and down the loft ladders was an exciting one indeed. Cat paradise, this place.

Unplugging: Meditations on Breaking up with the Internet

Snowshoeing Coal Basin, across the street from home

To drive from Seattle to the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado takes about 18 hours if you do it straight through—in a normal car. However, in a 14-foot Uhaul van hauling a loaded auto trailer and climbing mountain passes at a rip-roaring 40mph, the trip takes closer to 30 hours. And when the Uhaul place takes two hours to rent you your auto trailer the morning you need to leave, and when heavy night time fog swallows your vehicle whole, and when said Uhaul van comes with no CD player, no tape deck, no auxiliary port, and an AM/FM radio that offers few stations deep in the mountains…well, let’s just say that Steve and I had a lot of time on the road for conversations two weekends ago.

Among them was a discussion of the merits, or lack thereof, of Facebook.

Who hasn’t fantasized about quitting Facebook? I know I have. The wasted time scrolling glazed-eyed through my Newsfeed, the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) or uncomfortable jealousy that can ensue when perusing evidence of others’ adventures, the reality that while some posts can indeed introduce us to great ideas or articles or images or quotes, the vast majority do not.

I once heard the analogy that comparing your life to someone else’s based on Facebook is like comparing your own backstage to someone else’s highlights reel. Most of us can probably relate to this—the occasional twinges of inadequacy or insecurity when we look at other people’s lives from the outsides. If I had a dime for every time one of my college classmates (or really, any of my twentysomething friends) has posted on Facebook about what a failure our fellow class of ‘08 Oberlin alum Lena Dunham has made them feel like…well, I’d be a wealthy young lady indeed.

Most of us have probably contributed to this ourselves, too. We don’t intend to—after all, we’re trying to paint a nice life as much for ourselves as for the audience of our friends, family, and acquaintances. What we choose to share on Facebook is not false, nor even necessarily an exaggeration: people do get happily engaged, they take beautiful trips, they have cute babies, they land dream jobs, they wake up and feel genuinely blessed and grateful to be alive—and they absolutely deserve to be able to tell the world about it.

But I think it’s important to stay aware of how the details we broadcast about our lives are inevitably selective ones. As Steve articulated so well on the road that night, those details are often different, more carefully chosen, than the ones we might share in a one-on-one chat with a close friend—just as details were carefully chosen for mass email updates before there was Facebook, the way Christmas letters were before mass emails, and the way grandmothers were before Christmas letters.

It’s a fine line, though! Sharing our lives with each other online can serve great purposes. We can inspire one other, build communities, have dialogues about meaningful issues, stay current on the lives of friends we might otherwise lose touch with.

Indeed, there are plenty of such legitimate things for which I have enjoyed using Facebook. For one, getting my current job. I wouldn’t be in Colorado now if Trail Runner hadn’t posted on their Facebook page that they were looking for an assistant editor. Two, being a part of the trail running community. I met 95% of my trail running friends in Washington through the Seattle Mountain Running Facebook group. We used Facebook to coordinate runs with each other—so even at 5 a.m. on a cold, snowy Friday morning, I was able to find people to run up Mt. Si with me before work. Our Facebook group helped me feel part of a team in what’s essentially an individual sport, and fed me a steady stream of inspiration to hit the trails and live life to the fullest. Three, Facebook has made me feel less far away from my mom—who lives eight time zones away from me, across the Atlantic Ocean—because she can stay up on my day-to-day life. She sees pictures of the adventures I go on, gets notified when I update my blog, can trade comments back and forth with the friends I’ve made in my adult life.

Every time I’ve ever entertained the thought of quitting Facebook, my ego immediately protests: ‘That’s some crazy talk!’ I have fears: the fear of disappearing from people’s radar screens, the fear of being lonely, the fear of feeling out of touch, the fear that no one will read my blog if I don’t let them know on Facebook when I’ve written something on it. Will I still feel like a real person if I’m not on Facebook? It sounds ridiculous to ask this, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind; someone tell me I’m not the only one.

But after giving all my fears a little air to breathe…I feel pangs of excitement. I consider how much negativity Facebook has brought into my life. Ironically, it’s often made me feel farther away than ever from people I love. I know for a fact it’s done the same to many of them, at least upon occasion—I don’t have time to call or write a friend of mine across the country (or world), but I have time to make a Facebook album? That doesn’t feel good for anyone—and many of us are guilty of making someone in our life, at some point, feel less important to us than Facebook.

I often lament that I’m not in as good of touch with important people in my life as I’d like to be. You all know who you are; I could be better. It’s not that I don’t have time to sit down for an hour and write a long, meaningful letter to you; it’s that I’m throwing away that time Liking things instead, telling myself that logging on to FB helps me “unwind.” Where my mind came up with this propaganda, I have no idea.

Facebook doesn’t relax me; it makes me anxious. Like Nicholas Carr wrote in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, social media makes me feel like a rat running around a maze, pressing little levers in hopes of triggering a moment of pleasure—the fleeting high of someone commenting on a status or Liking a photo. Facebook has made me virtually incapable of sitting still or taking a walk or waking up in the morning without feeling tempted to pull out my iPhone and check my Newsfeed, hope for those exhilarating little red numbers next to my friend requests, my inbox, my notifications. I’ve checked Facebook in bed, during dinner with friends, during work meetings, in the bathroom at bars, while in traffic (I’m particularly ashamed to admit that one, but I’m being candid here), while hiking in the woods, and plenty of other places I no longer want to interrupt with technology.

As Steve and I drove farther and farther away from the bustle of the city, deeper into the quiet of the mountains, and the more we talked about all this, the stronger my conviction: my life would be better off without Facebook.

But, I’m not going to up and quit today. First of all, I’m writing this blog entry from our new home in a tiny mountain town, where we have no cell phone reception or Internet—so even if I wanted to quit Facebook right here and right now, I couldn’t. This blog entry is being composed in archaic Microsoft Word, and will benefit from fresh eyes in the morning before I drive into town for work and broadcast it to the world.

Second of all, my desire to let go of Facebook does not mean I want to give the world a hasty, impulsive peace-out. I don’t want to disconnect; if anything, I want to reconnect. I want to make my interactions more meaningful, more personal, more…joyful, even. And that will take some planning.

Third of all, I actually use Facebook a fair amount in my working life now—to help manage the Trail Runner Facebook page, to track down photos or contact information for stories, to stay on top of buzz in the greater trail running community.

So while my fantasy of quitting Facebook altogether is louder than ever, I’m still not sure it’s realistic (yet). What I do feel is realistic, however, is drastically changing my habits with it—beginning with the fact that Steve and I have no plans to get Internet in our home. If we want the Internet, we can pay six dollars (still roughly less than or at least equal to the cost of gas to drive into town) for a 24-hour block of it—which we plan to do perhaps once a week. It's more expensive than offering to chip in for and share our neighbors' wi-fi, but we figure we'll be more likely to succeed in unplugging if the temptation isn't omnipresent.

These disconnected evenings have been a fascinating experiment indeed. After a few stubborn clues in Friday’s crossword had us stumped, we might have been tempted to Google the answers we needed. Alas, there was no Google to consult. So we took a walk and came back to it with fresh eyes—and our brains, able to come up with many of the answers that had previously eluded us, undoubtedly got a better workout because of it.

Is it necessary for everything in our lives to be so instantaneous after all? Is the state of not knowing something knowable a state we can learn to be patient with? I forget; I went for a snowy road run after work one day last week, and reached for my laptop when I got back to map my run online and calculate the distance I’d covered. But did it really matter that I didn’t know exactly how many miles I’d run?

When I got home from my run to find an empty house, I wanted to text Steve to see where he was, but of course, I couldn’t. Was it the end of the world to not know where he was, or when he’d be home? Of course not; I survived. And I thoroughly enjoyed the old-fashioned flutter of excitement in my stomach every time I heard the crunch of car tires on the snow outside, wondering if it might be him. I relished my eagerness to swap stories about each other’s days—of which we knew nothing about, because we hadn’t called, texted, emailed, or posted on Facebook all day long.

So, if my friends far away don’t see full albums of photos of my day-to-day life, will we perhaps have more to talk about and more to share with each other when we do catch up? I sure hope so. I will still write and share photos occasionally on my blog, but I won’t use it as an excuse to not also write or call those I love. I especially want to be more conscious of not painting slanted images of my life on my blog. At the risk of getting uncomfortably personal, I hope I can give a fair and balanced report of my life here.

A final note: the last thing I want this entry to be is a high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou declaration of my rejection of social media and the Internet. I don’t think either is evil, or that everyone would necessarily be better off without them. But here, now, withdrawal from daily use of the Internet in my free time—and in particular, of Facebook—feels like the right move. Drop me a line at yitkawinn@gmail.com with your phone number, email address and/or home address, and a note on how you’d best like to connect with me. 

---

Bonus Reading

• On how perfect everyone else’s lives seem from the outside, and rejecting the pressure to seem perfect: http://www.danoah.com/2010/09/disease-called-perfection.html
• A 2008 piece from Nicholas Carr on whether Google (as a metaphor for the Internet) is making us stupid: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868
• Flickr founder and entrepreneur Caterina Fake's examination of FOMO (fear of missing out) and social media: http://caterina.net/2011/03/15/fomo-and-social-media 
• Culture blogger Anil Dash's embrace of JOMO (joy of missing out), in response to Caterina's blog: http://dashes.com/anil/2012/07/jomo.html 

Living my fullest life

Yowzaz! Pretty sure this is the longest I've gone without blogging since I moved to Seattle. Perhaps if I get some major life updates out of the way, I won't feel as daunted by writing in my blog in the future, because the big things are covered and I can go back to writing about small everyday joys and more mundane musings. Here goes:

1. Alan and I moved into our new place on Lower Queen Anne! We had a successful housewarming BBQ/birthday party at the new digs with friends, our newly minted grill, and the most delicious homemade red velvet cake ever - kudos and thanks to my friend and baker extraordinaire Lauren W.


2. My temp copywriting job at REI Headquarters has been extended a few times, so I'm still commuting down to Kent daily to research, learn about and write about all the sweet gear we sell. Pretty pleased to still be working there! What kinds of things do I write? See here. Straightforward as our writing tasks often are, I am forever inspired by my colleagues' cleverness and creativity.

3. Yours truly has become a running/training/athletic MACHINE! Well, so I like to think. I got in a bit of inspired frenzy to sign myself up for a bunch of races. On the docket for the coming months are two full marathons, one half, and my third official ultra (50K). Oh! And I'm going to run 30+ miles around the perimeter of Mount Saint Helens in a few weeks with my friend and fellow Dutch/Swedish hybrid, Ged. Wish us luck!

4. Speaking of running...in July, a team of 11 friends and I tackled the Ragnar Northwest Passage 190-mile Relay for the second year in a row. Our team, the Alpacas by Day, Ninjas by Night, had a blast. I wrote a story about it for the REI blog here. (Beware: link does not always cooperate in Firefox. Try another browser if it doesn't work.)


I am blessed with good friends in this city.
5. Speaking of more running, I tackled my steepest, most rugged trail run yet last month, with my now-longtime trail running pals, Elodie and Tom - the Angel's Staircase run in the Methow Valley, about four hours east of Seattle on the other side of the mountains. 5000 feet of elevation change over 25 kilometers, peaking at 8000 feet, with stunning views in all directions. 6th place among women, I'll take it!


This ridiculously awesome photo courtesy of Glenn Tachiyama.




Beautiful views courtesy of race director James Varner, whom I interviewed and wrote this story on for Outdoors NW magazine several months ago.

6. Oh, and let's talk about where those marathons are that I've signed up for. I'm going to Vegas, baby! Running the strip at night - a nighttime marathon, how cool is that? Talked into it by my lunchtime running buddy at work, Logan (not that it was a really hard sell...)

7. But what's even better than Vegas? Answer: Flying over the North Pole on a direct flight from Seattle to Amsterdam to visit my mom and run the marathon there next month! Dutch Rosetta Stone lessons are in full throttle again. Can't believe it's taken me four years to get myself back to Holland, but it will great to see my mama and run 26.2 in the city that made me truly fall in love with running in the first place.


I took this photo in 2007. The marathon course runs along this river.
8. Alan took me to see Weezer on my birthday last month. In case you didn't hear the story (I love this story!), Alan and I were walking along a street in Seattle many months ago and passed a billboard advertising Weezer in Seattle on August 19. Knowing that I was once upon a time a big Weez' fan, he asked if I'd like to go. Snootily, I scoffed that the only way I'd go to a Weezer concert today was if they played Blue Album start to finish. We turned a corner and the next billboard we saw was, "WEEZER - Playing Blue Album and Pinkerton, start to finish." Wha?!! So we went! It satisfied in the nostalgia realm in big ways.


Yup, I was quite sure I could dig up an old photo of me in my trusty Weezer tee. Me, at 15, with my parents and Dutch cousins/family I haven't seen in years.
9. Been trying to ride my bike more lately...commuting a lot around on two wheels, including several bike trips up to Green Lake in the north part of this city, to go swimming with Oberlin friends - Ruth, who's happily staying another year in Seattle to continue working for Habitat for Humanity, and Shari, who spent the whole summer here leading kids' nature camps for the Audubon Society. Do I have cool friends or what?

10. So, I've been writing all this while sprawled out on a bunch of pillows and blankets on our balcony, looking at the night profile of the Cascade mountains, the shimmering Lake Union, the Seattle skyline all lit up, and even a good number of stars. Really, really happy in the new apartment! A good friend of mine whom I'll kindly keep anonymous recently paraphrased my blog as "Blah blah blah ohhhh Seattle, blah blah blah I'm so special because I love Seattle soooo much blah blah"...snarky, sure, but that's the nature of our friendship anyway (he's the big brother I never had!) and furthermore, I can't imagine a better summation of my feelings. Thank you, you know who you are, for stating it so eloquently. Indeed, I freakin' love this place!

11. Have we been over the fact that I get to have a reunion next month with this wonderful woman?


It's been a long time coming. Thank you, good world, for giving me the opportunities to work hard, play hard and accomplish so many of the things in 2011 that I hoped I could. And thanks to everyone in my life who's making this one amazing ride! You all are great.

The times, they are a-changin'

Two weeks ago, Alan and I got a notice on our front door, announcing that our building had been procured by new owners. In 60 days, our rent would jump by over $500 a month. My mood about it, since then, has ranged from stress and anger (stage 1) to delirious amusement (stage 2) to a quiet, tentative sense of excitement (stage 3).

Stage 2 delirious amusement came in considering how NOT worth the new rental rate our building is. Yes, it's been a great place to settle into Seattle - walkable to everything from work to downtown to the stadiums to quaint neighborhood main drags to stunning views and urban parks, close access to highways to the mountains too, a quiet building with mostly good neighbors, etc.

But there are plenty of issues that we've tried to ignore for the last couple years. I won't go into detail here about them, but they're pretty 50/50 with the positives.

The new owners are not really landlords. They're a small investment company who renovate beat up, old buildings into fancy new apartments to make them far more profitable for owners. They don't really expect us to pay the new rent; they just want us out to do their renovations and help along our "rapidly gentrifying neighborhood." (Their phrasing, not mine.)

Learning that caused a brief plummet back into stage 1 (stress and anger), but it was shortly replaced by a leap into stage 3 (!) when I started cruising apartment listings. Although the market for renters is much tougher now than it was two years ago when we were last looking, we managed to land a new place within about a week and a half of initiating the search - and it's a great one!

And so stage 3 continues. Now that I know for sure where we are going, I feel like I'm at the beginning of a new relationship - giddy, distracted, and ultimately obsessed with the concept of something I really don't know at all...but will, very very soon. As I write this, I'm on my lunch break at work, chowing down over my keyboard so I can get some of my infatuated ramblings off my chest before plunging back into work.

We'll be moving to Queen Anne - the other major hill in Seattle that nuzzles downtown. The famous, so-called "Frasier view" is taken from Queen Anne. I took the following photo on my first run up the hill, nearly two years ago.


Hassles of moving week itself aside, we'll get to enjoy all the perks of moving without the hassle of having to find new jobs or new friends. Instead, we'll get to explore new cafes, new restaurants, new bookstores, new libraries, new ice cream shops, new running routes, new evening walks, new hidden public stairways and secret views...all the exciting aspects of going somewhere new!

We'll be in a nicer neighborhood overall, and finally have covered off-street parking! We'll have our very own balcony with beautiful views of the Seattle skyline, Mt. Rainier, Lake Union and the Cascade mountains. We'll have enough space to not need a separate storage unit anymore. And all for about the same price we pay now!

Clearly, we should have made this move a long time ago.

In the meantime, as with all goodbyes - however small - I have lists of things I will miss about our current home...lists of things I still haven't ever gotten around to doing in our neighborhood, that are imperative to do before moving next month. Funny how a deadline sometimes is all the push you need to grant yourself the experiences you've been thinking about, if not dreaming of. Nostalgic list entry coming soon to my blog :)

ZOOM ZOOM goes the rocket over the elephant shooting ants out of its nose!

Weekends are lovely. Why did I ignore this fact for my first year in Seattle?


More FoodBlog! Homemade raw broccoli/zucchini hummus.
Yesterday, James and I trekked down to Burien to cash in LivingSocial deal coupons we'd purchased months ago for hourlong massages. We spent the rest of the afternoon having various adventures in Ballard, at Grocery Outlet (duh), and just hanging out at my apartment, watching the latest Office episode on Hulu (five years and counting since I've lived with a TV), listening to bluegrass and cooking stuff. Dinnertime brought new guests, and the five of us had a lovely evening of butternut squash soup, fresh bread, vegetables with various hummus dips - homemade and otherwise, wine, chocolate truffles, and pumpkin cookies to round it all out.




Who recognizes the table?
We all stayed up until well into the wee hours of the morning playing games - everything from Balderdash to a paper-and-pens game that Leo suggested. As he explained it, I didn't think I'd played it before; everybody sits in a circle, and each person has a sheet of paper. You make up one narrative sentence, write it down, then pass your sheet to the right. Then everybody has to illustrate the sentence they've been passed. Then you fold the sheet over so that only the illustration appears (and the original sentence is hidden), and pass again. Now everyone writes a sentence to describe the illustration they're handed. And folds it so only the sentence appears, and passes again. And so forth.

Essentially, the game is like telephone, on paper. The worse of an artist you are, the better, and the more ridiculous the sentence becomes as it gets passed around and altered with each new rendition. We were down to four people by then, so each sheet only got a few passes, but it was still amusing. My original sentence evolved as such:


Elodie and I continued the excellence of food tradition today with a lazy morning around the apartment, baking banana bread, drinking Dutch chocolate milk and green smoothies (grapes + pineapple + peaches + banana + kale + cucumber today), and making a scrumptious egg scramble with all the orphan veggies in my fridge, plus goat cheese. Delicious!

So here's the funny thing...and the real point of this blog entry in this first place...(aside from reveling in how awesome my friends are, and how nice it is to relax together over delicious food)...so also last night, after playing Leo's game, I went digging through my personal filing system and found a sheet of paper I'd saved from one time when I'd played what I remembered as a similar game to the one Leo proposed. It was, in fact, the exact same game, and one that Seyeon and I had played six years ago at Stanford, when we'd just met each other. And guess what? My story sentence back then was eerily similar to the one I wrote last night:


Six years later, apparently I'm still fascinated with abused, down-on-their-luck anteaters.

Who wants to psychoanalyze me?

A rude awakening

I have 7,000 things I need/want to blog about, BUT this morning, I've got about ten minutes I feel okay devoting to blogging before I get on with my to-do list, and there is one thing above all that absolutely NEEDS addressing.

At approximately 5:30 a.m. this morning, I woke up to a very noisy, very nearby clamor. It took a few seconds to register what was happening: someone was yanking open the blinds on the window right over the headboard of my bed...they were jerking upward at an alarmingly fast but haphazard rate. I think the thought in my head right at that moment was, $@#%, somebody'sbreakingindamnitI'mdoomedIhopealltheimportantpeopleknowhowmuchIlovethem...

...until I sat up in a panic, flipped the light on, and realized what was actually happening. Chloe had gotten herself tangled in the cord of the blinds. She'd managed to get it to be a sling for her belly as she leapt from my pillow to my nightstand, thereby pulling the entirety of the blinds open in one (albeit herky-jerky) fell swoop.

I'm still trying to figure out whether I've got the clutziest, most accident-prone cat ever created, or the brightest, craftiest one in the world who's simply realized that quieter efforts (tromping across my pillow and wiping alternating sides of her body across my face like a paintbrush, gentle paw-prodding at my eyelids) to wake up her breakfast-provider have proven fruitless lately. Chloe knows: desperate times call for desperate measures.

The adrenaline rush of thinking someone was breaking in to my apartment kept me up for awhile. I might have been angry, but she's just so darn cute...

FOOD BLOG.

Vegetable carnage! (Awesome caption credit to Zoe Dash.)
So, I've been meaning to make a food post for awhile...especially now that I've expended some energy pestering Cam to bring food musings into his primarily-hiking-themed blog. This blog has taken many forms over time - road trip blog, introspective musings, music playlist offerings, coffeeshop reviews, rambling obsessive thoughts about running, a nod to Seattle tourism promotion, Pacific Northwest weather report, sometimes the occasional foodstuffs entry, etc...and it is my hope that it will continue to evolve and adapt over time, and be what it needs to be for writer and audience alike.

But today, I want to celebrate a few more of my successes in the kitchen! Well, not all total successes...but in the vein of my favorite life quote, "Everything is either a good time or a good story", I guess every cooking experiment is either a good dinner or a good blog entry. Hopefully this will be a little of both.

The above vegetable carnage led to another dish I prepared from my favorite vegan cookbook.

Sweet Polenta Pie

6/10 on the yummy scale.
...basically a big casserole dish of cornmeal topped with a bunch of roasted veggies and a homemade tomato/veggie sauce. The sauce, as prepared by the recipe, was a little runny. Nevertheless, the dish was pretty good overall, but in that Wow-this-is-healthy sort of way, rather than the Oh-my-gosh-give-me-seconds sort of way. I think I've lost my vegan palate; I couldn't help but dump some grated cheddar on top of it when it came out of the oven.

Next:
Boerenkool Stamppot, i.e. "The Green Stuff"

9/10 on the yummy scale.
So this is a special one, as it was my favorite dish growing up - a traditional Dutch entree involving mashed potatoes infused with kale and sausage. I didn't work from a recipe here, but combined rough advice from my mom in a recent Skype conversation with my limited potato-mashing experience, and utilized my favorite "Smoked Apple and Chardonnay" chicken sausage from Trader Joe's. Very good. Took this one in a thermos with me for lunch on my last hike, and have been working away all week long at the giant vat of it I made.

Dijon Scalloped Potatoes

3/10 on the yummy scale.
Looks decent, right? But, oof; this one was a real bummer. Again, after conversation with Cam, I was inspired to venture out in search of a good scalloped potatoes recipe. This one was from the vegan cookbook, too, but since I was all out of soymilk, I just used regular milk. Maybe that was where I went wrong? I left them in the oven the suggested time, and the potatoes still weren't thoroughly cooked, so I left them in awhile longer, but then the top started getting a bit crusty...but the potatoes were still a bit underdone. And the dijon mustard made for a funky taste in combo with the suggested turmeric. Again, kind of decent with some sour cream and cheese at the end, but otherwise, not a recipe I'll repeat.

Vegan Garden Vegetable Borscht (paired with scalloped potatoes and cornbread)

7/10 on the yummy scale.
Another one of those wow-this-is-healthy dishes. Really great, colorful combo of fresh vegetables, including beets and cabbage and spinach and carrots and tomatoes. Tastes about like you'd imagine it - like V8 in non-blended form. But sooo wonderful to warm up with a big ol' bowl of hot, hearty soup during what's been a pretty intensely cold week here! (It snowed for the all of 20 seconds yesterday...what?!)

Homemade Granola with Cocoa, Cranberries & Sunflower Seeds

9/10 on the yummy scale.
I finally made my own granola! Again, not from a recipe...just combining ideas from probably a half dozen different granola recipes I consulted online and in my cookbooks. I've always thought making granola was really hard, for some reason - but it was a breeze...and lots of room for creativity to play around with different nut and dried fruit varieties, as well as various spices and other fun add-ins like cocoa powder or almond butter or shredded coconut. I did slightly burn my first batch, but not badly enough to deter from taste. Awesome with maple yogurt and a little agave nectar!


And now for the baked goods...

Vegan Applesauce Muffins with Raisins

7/10 on the yummy scale.

Teff Peanut Butter Cookies

8/10 on the yummy scale.

Sweet Potato Cornbread

10/10 on the yummy scale. !!
Mmm, yes, despite the photo not looking as appetizing, perhaps, as some of my other inclusions in this entry, this cornbread has been by far the highlight of all my kitchen adventures. From my vegan cookbook, though with a lot of modifications: gross estimations on all the measurements because all my cups and spoons were dirty at this point in my evening cooking fest, weird sweet potatoes from Madison Market (I had no idea not all sweet potatoes are orange...), 2% milk instead of soymilk, apple cider vinegar in place of regular vinegar, real eggs instead of egg replacer...but holy cow! This is the doughiest, softest, sweetest corn bread ever, without an ounce of butter or margarine or anything, and primarily flavored with the natural sweetness of the potatoes. Wholly awesome.


Now time to clean up my frenzied mess...

Big Girl Life in Seattle

Well, in an attempt to break from the theme that's dominated my blog for the last several entries...a recap of the highs and lows of my life in the domestic realm of late!

GREAT SUCCESS, 2010:

I've finally decided to get serious about cooking. This will probably last about as long as it already has - five days - but so far, so good. Awhile ago, I bought a fancy spice rack and a bunch of big, glass containers to hold all my grains and pastas and flour and everything, in a desperate attempt to inspire myself to move beyond my comfy world of salads and ham/cheese sandwiches. My first step in changing things up was a burrito week, in which my grocery trip comprised of unusual items (for me) like sour cream, avocado, tortillas, some canned chicken breast, and a supersize bag of cheddar cheese...and for one week straight, I enjoyed every meal and felt very pleased with myself for doing something different food-wise. But my stomach suffered, and I probably gained approximately a pound a day (thought that wouldn't be possible running the kind of mileage I have been, but it happened) and so I've moved on and this week, actually managed to do something good for my body.

I spent last Thursday and Friday cooking up a storm - made a bunch of quinoa with mustard greens and tempeh (thanks Kyle for the inspiration!), a green chile egg casserole (thanks Becca for the recipe!), and a big ol' vat of vegan chili (thanks to this awesome cookbook). I'm still enjoying great meals from all of those cooking endeavors! And no, I'm not reverting back to my vegetarian/vegan days, but I do believe that maintaining a largely plant-based diet is generally a good thing...and I'm trying to cut down on gluten consumption in general, too. I find that the more I run/train, the better fuel I put in my body - so it's a productive cycle. Anyway, the idea is that the more I cook ahead of time, the healthier I eat throughout my busy work weeks, rather than reverting to quick, easy, but often nutrient-deficient, meals.

Other successes: finally managed to set up a decent paper-filing system for myself. Coming from someone who tends to throw the majority of my daily mail into a dark corner of my apartment where I don't have to look at it, this was a big step in feeling a little less chaos in my life. And subsequently, no epic fails yet in the newly-developed bill-paying aspect of my life:


Paying bills is AWESOME.
I also managed to "build" five whole pieces of furniture, all by myself. Granted, IKEA does a pretty darn good job with their instructions, but still...


Chloe ponders the odd-sized IKEA box.


Chloe is skeptical of my abilities. Probably for good reason.


But aha, I prevail! Chloe expresses her approval with zombie eyes.
The other four pieces are dining room chairs. No picture, but I'm pleased. So now, someday when I finish the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle I've overzealously begun working on our dining room table, I'll be able to officially host a dinner party!

EPIC FAIL, 2010:

Some of you know my cooking history - and for those who do, you've already had your mind blown by the above section. Some of you, however, probably don't yet grasp just how miserably inept I am when it comes to cooking, and thus here's the real mind-blowing clincher of the year thus far: I failed my second lifetime attempt to make mac 'n cheese. (The first time was winter term, freshman year at Oberlin. Pathetically, it was Easy Mac. I just dumped the noodles in a bowl and put them in the microwave just like that. No water or anything.)

This time around, I boiled a bunch of water, then dumped in not only the macaroni, but all the cheese powder, too - naturally, six cups of cheesy water got drained out at the end, and the result was slightly yellow-tinged, absolutely flavorless macaroni. Awesome.

COMBO EPIC FAIL/GREAT SUCCESS 2010:

Apparently, after Christmas is over, the tree doesn't just magically disappear from your living room one day in early January. I swear, back in the day, it did. But no longer...and so it came to be the second week of February and the Christmas tree was still cowering in a corner, shedding its needles in mass. Yes, I gave getting rid of it some thought here and there...I had researched tree-recycling options in Seattle. I printed out directions to a recycling center. Once the dates passed for that, I sent my landlord a sad little email to the effect of, "Um, I know it's the end of January, but any thoughts on what to do with my Christmas tree at this point?"

She didn't even dignify it with a response.

Thank goodness for friends who like to destroy things. Jess came over this evening with a jeweler's saw, and paired with my serrated bread knife, we made quick work of the little guy. Photo diary of our systematic tree-dismantling:








Yup. I think I'm doing all right at this Life/Real World thing. Not spectacularly...but definitely all right. Next entry: more photos from race weekend, and likely, back to my usual ramblings about running. (Though I have been meaning to do an entry soon about all the books I've read in the last few months. I know I wrote at one point that I'd review books regularly; obviously, that's working out a lot like the mac 'n cheese...but I have been reading, and at some point I'll certainly address those good reads here on my blog.)

Photo album catch-up

New banner for the blog! (I find Photoshop oddly therapeutic and relaxing after a long day at work.) I tried to include all my favorite iconic Seattle things, as well as the topics that tend to dominate my entries. From left to right: (1) fresh tomatoes growing over the summer in Seyeon's garden, (2) me running the Seattle marathon, (3) sunset over Puget Sound, as seen from Queen Anne hill, (4) Space Needle, of course, (5) a cup of Vivace cappucino, (6) the shelves at the infamous Elliott Bay Books, and (7) an evergreen with Mount Rainier (very, very faintly...look hard!) in the background.

My legs seem to have fully recovered from the marathon by now. I did a 10-miler yesterday, and for the first time ever, I made it back from the shores of Lake Washington without having to walk any of the brutal, endless uphill blocks from there until home. I'm more motivated and determined than ever to conquer Seattle hills, and I'll be damned if the cold front that's sweeping the entire country, it seems, keeps me inside.

In the meantime, I rediscovered some lovely, autumn-in-Seattle pictures I took several weeks ago, when the leaves were still richly colored...it's no longer quite this autumn-like, but given that the last few days here have been clear and beautiful, these photos aren't too far off the mark for how this city's felt lately...just cold. Really cold.


Pretty Seattle.


Cal Anderson Park, Capitol Hill


Fallen leaves.
If my memory's serving me correctly, it hasn't rained (not really, anyway) since last weekend, before the marathon. This feels unreal for Seattle, but the sunshine and clear, spectacular views of the snow-capped mountain ranges on both sides of the city have been fantastic. It's just the darn brutal cold. (Although Seattle's "brutal cold" has got nothing on Ohio's hardcore lake effect weather patterns, so I'm not complaining.) REI's rockabilly-themed holiday party was last night, complete with bowling, pool and awesome catered food...but WOW was the walk in red tights and an argyle mini-skirt COLD.

No photos (yet?) of that evening, so instead, I'll just include a precious couple from the last great REI event - our end-of-the-year meeting, which was Winter-Olympics-themed and therefore awesome. Each department represented a different country. Footwear was Italy, and as such, we dressed to the nines and Cam and Jeff made us all amazing cardboard Vespas on which to ride proudly into the meeting room several weeks ago. I collaged mine:


Furthermore, as part of our department's pentathlon team, I donned a kiddie hiker pack and a helmet and jumproped across the room and back...


...then hopped on a longboard, where I was pushed back across the room by a coworker in snow boots. Ahh, nothing better than getting together with four hundred other outdoors-loving dorks to play with all the cool stuff REI sells. Our awesome CEO, Sally Jewell, came out for it, and there were free ice cream sundaes and company holiday presents (awesome day hike packs emblazoned with "REI Staff") for all of us, and Jeff was granted a prestigious Anderson Award... = major company-wide recognition, his name engraved in a brick at headquarters, and an all-expenses trip with Sally to go play in the wilderness for four days. Basically, I love love love REI.

In other exciting seasonal news, Alan and I got a Christmas tree! I also finally managed to get the plates on my car switched over (Washington has to be the pickiest, most stubborn state in this country; I still haven't managed to convince them enough yet of my residency in their state to be eligible for a Washington state driver's license), so here she is, in all her Washington-ed and Christmas-ed out glory:


And, as promised, a few photos from around the apartment:


The Christmas tree, installed.


Chloe plays tetherball with a Christmas ornament.


Cuddlefest on the living room couch. (Take note of Chloe; she kind of blends in with the couch.) Photo courtesy of Seyeon!


Me demonstrating my butternut-squash soup enthusiasm


More kitchen.


Bookcase! Thank you, Goodwill.
More soon. It's now almost midnight, and I just realized it's Monday. And I got nothing to show for it, coffeeshop-wise. Shoot! My humblest apologies...