5 Little Chickens and How They Grew

Our girls are really all grown up now!  All 5 of them have been laying consistently for a few weeks now, and we are loving having so many eggs to enjoy and give to friends and family!  I even made a batch of deviled eggs for an early morning meeting with my fellow leads at the bookstore!  They were gone in a heart beat!

With all the rain we had been getting lately, coupled with the fact that it's been dark when we leave the house and dark soon after we arrive home, the girls' run was getting very muddy.  They'd been cooped up too much, and were getting poop everywhere!  It was getting pretty darn stinky.  So we decided we had best extend the roof out over the whole run with the hopes that it will keep things a bit drier down there.  Since we have to walk into the run to get at their food and water, this was pretty important to me since I don't "do" bad smells.  I just don't have the constitution.  Gonna be a problem if we have kids, I know.  Anyway, we loaded up the Subaru (!) with some metal roofing, and today Kevin has been busily working away at it while I get the house cleaned and raked the backyard free of all the hundreds of pounds of leaves that dropped this week!

Since he needed to get on both sides of the coop to work, the girls have been running around in the yard and I decided they needed a photo shoot!  The lighting wasn't great, but I think they are beautiful anyway.

 The light this morning was phenomenal!  Made it much easier to motivate myself to do some yard work!

 Scrambled still thinks she's hot stuff, and likes being Queen of the Yard!  She still flies into stuff though, so the name still suits her klutzy nature.

 He's pretty hot stuff.  :)  Oh, he also rigged up a water heating system til our real one arrives (hopefully very soon!).  He had to drill a hole in the garage since we don't have any outdoor outlets, and then ran it all the way through the yard up to the coop, very nicely hidden.  Then he attached the brooding lamp to the underside of the coop directly over their waterer.  Hopefully, that will keep things from freezing over the next few days!  It's supposed to be COLD!

 Frittata, Scrambled, Florentine, and Deviled.  Hollandaise just wasn't ready to have her photo taken.

 All 5 of the girls!

 What's up, Chicken Butt?  :)

 Hello there!  She really wanted to peck the camera, but wasn't fast enough for me!  Ha!

  She'll get me next time, I know...

 We are getting about 4 to 5 eggs a day, though with the weather getting colder we're assuming that will dropped off a bit.  They are getting nice and big, and are so delicious!  I'm never going to be able to have store bought eggs on a regular basis again!

There's even one who lays speckled eggs!  

I didn't think I would enjoy having hens around so much, but every day it's fun to go up and say hi to them and give them little treats.  When I went up earlier to take photos, they all ran over to me!  It's like having a pet who gives you yummy breakfast!  :) 

On another note, I made a delicious carrot cake last night for Kevin's birthday.  His birthday was in March, but I don't think he's holding it against me, at least not now that there is actual cake in his belly!  Next year, I'm shooting to get it in the same month at least! 

In which I yammer about cars

On Halloween evening, we parked at a Park and Ride near our house to go to the Sounders match.  Sadly, they lost the game, and when we got back to the P and R, our car sounded very strange when we started it up.  I thought maybe since it was Halloween, someone had played a prank and stuck something in our exhaust pipe.  Checked it out, and didn't see anything amiss. 

It's a 1990 Corolla, so we'd been thinking it going to die pretty soon here, and had sort of been planning on buying a new car for awhile, but didn't have the motivation to go car shopping.  We kind of just thought, "Well, she finally died, guess it was the car's time to go."  We got it home, though it was moving very sluggishly and making a ton of noise.  Sort of like those cars that have the suped up engines and no mufflers. 

The next day, Kevin went to see what there was to see, and got underneath the car.  He called up to me that it looked like someone had sawed off part of the exhaust pipe under the car.  I thought that was really random, but thought it was just some jackass playing a prank.  After consulting the owner's manual thought, Kevin found that it actually our catalytic converter that was gone, and after a very brief search of the Internet, found out that they are a popular thing to steal these days.  I guess they have some amount of platinum in them, so precious metals and all that.  Bleh!!!  We felt so violated!  We never really thought twice about leaving our car places, since it's old and kind of junky looking.  I guess it's true what they say: It's what's on the inside that counts!  Since the car isn't worth very much, and converters are kind of expensive to replace, we decided to bite the bullet and get a new car!

So for the last week and a half, we have been doing nonstop car shopping and research.  Kevin did an amazing job figuring out all kinds of useful info, and finding good places for us to go car shopping.  Luckily, my dad loaned us his Miata so we could still get around!  We did a lot of test drives, and went back and forth about whether we wanted something that gets good gas mileage but maybe wouldn't be as great for things like road trips and going to the moutains (like a Prius),  and something that had a lot of room and could get us anywhere but we would have to eat a lot more money in gas.  After driving a few different cars, we kept coming back to getting a Forester, which we have both loved for a long time.  We don't like the newest model, so we knew we would be getting a used car, so it just came down to finding a good one at the right price!  Fortunately, it didn't take too long.  Long enough for our house to completely fall apart without any chores getting done and no food being cooked, but not as bad as it could have been!

We ended up buying one in Renton from the Subaru dealer there, but only after a lot of apprehension about them.  It was a really weird experience!  It's run by a bunch of hyperactive Eastern European men in leather jackets who clearly want their cars sold fast and furious.  Kevin and I are anything but fast and furious (read: 8 years to get married!)  :)  But they had a great looking 2006 Forester with really low mileage that had just been traded in earlier that day.  It hadn't been through it's complete inspection and detailing, so we wanted to wait to take it for a real test drive when it was completely ready to be sold.  The guys really wanted us to buy it that day, but we held firm that we wanted to see it in the light of day and take it for a test drive.

Fortunately, Kevin had Thursday off for Veteran's Day, so first thing in the morning he headed to Renton to check it out again and take it for a drive.  It seemed great still, and the price was much better than most of the other Foresters out there.  So he went ahead and bought it, then took it for a buyer's inspection up here in Shoreline.    The guys there are totally awesome, very thorough and super patient explaining everything to me in terms I could relay to Kevin.  Luckily, there was nothing actually wrong with the car, and they gave it a flawless bill of health!  Hooray!  So here's our new car!

Happy Halloween!

Spelunking!

This last weekend, Kevin and I headed down to Vancouver to visit our friends Taylor and Nate.  We wanted to get our scare on to prepare for Halloween next week, and so we decided to watch scary movies and head to the Ape Caves near Mt St Helens!  The movies were good, but the caves were even better!  I didn't think that I would do very well in the pitch black in a loooooooong tunnel, but I had a ton of fun and only freaked myself out 6 or 7 times seeing things in my headlamp that weren't really there! 

 Short tunnel on an interpretive trail that probably scared me and Taylor the most!  We had to crawl on hands and knees the whole way!

 Really dark in there!  Hi Taylor!

 Kevin examines "the meatball" and considers whether it would still be good on top of spaghetti.

 Kevin was definitely in his element, he loved crawling down scary passages and finding little rooms where there could be treasure!  A mouse ran past him right here, and I still managed to follow him despite my best judgement.

 Note my incredibly wide eyes.  I was really not cool with the mice.

 Nate found a great perch to listen to his own breathing and the dripping of the caves while the rest of us were down a tunnel.

 I call this "The birth of a geologist."

 That is one good looking couple.

 Had no idea it was so red there!

 Nate being slightly creepy!

 Our only group shot, a little dark, but you know, it was a cave.

 We emerge!  It was amazing how vivid all the fall foliage looked to us after being in the dark for a few hours!  It was beautiful!

Taylor ponders returning to become a mole person.

It was another fabulous weekend with two of our favorite people.  It's fun having friends who like adventures, even if they live farther away than we'd like.  Oh, and we had Burgerville pumpkin milkshakes.  Get yourself one. You'll thank me later!

Jackson Time!

Matt and Jackson came over for a visit on Sunday.  It has been quite some time since we got to hang with the little guy for more than an hour, and we had a great time playing in the sunshine, visiting with the hens, and going on a hayride at the grocery store!

 Can you believe this kid's hair?!  Out of control, but so cute!  :)

 Aaahhhh, dirt!

 King of the mountain!

 My little pumpkin with the big pumpkin!

 Yes, it was a hayride in the parking lot of our grocery store, but Jackson loved it!  Every corner we took, he would say "weeeeeeeeee!"  

 He also thought the tractor driver was pretty funny!

He cried when we had to get off!  2 year olds are funny!

We also enjoyed some pumpkin bratwursts and hot apple cider!  Love visiting with my little guy!

Lamar Hunt US Open Cup 2010

Last Tuesday, the Seattle Sounders made history by becoming the first MLS team to win back to back Open Cup championships, and I was there to see it happen!  It was an incredibly fun game, made all the more excellent by our insanely good seats.  It's such a rarity to get to see your team win a trophy at home, and we were all so happy to be there for the game.  Some highlights from the match:

Second row on a gorgeous Seattle evening

Adam and Mark get their game faces on!

We are the Blue, We are the Green!

The Emerald City Supporters always bring great banners!

James Riley's stellar defense

My boyfriend Osvaldo Alonso.  I love him.  Sorry Kevin!  :)

Nathan Sturgis takes a corner kick...right next to us!

Sounders defeat the Crew 2-1!!!!

Celebration Time!!!!

Now the Sounders have made the MLS playoffs, starting sometime at the end of the month, so soccer love continues for us!  Huzzah!  Go Sounders!!!!

Cider Pressing!

We had a late pressing this year for cider do to an insanely busy summer, apples not being ready at the same time, and the family with the most apples to press having late ripening apples!  Kevin and I have two apple trees, but the big one was pretty much spent in July!  Mark and Susan didn't have many apples this year, so Adam and Erin were our big providers with about 15 bags.  Susan and Mark added another couple coolers and some bags.  We missed the "H" family this year, but their harvest was meager as well.

So with a much smaller pressing party than usual, we got to work on Saturday morning!  We were only 5 in number plus Corbin!  Erin and Eliza had to fly back East for her grandfather's funeral, and Neal was probably hitchhiking his way across Wales or something.

Grandpa and Corbin gather the last of the apples out front

The cutest apple of them all!

Umm, does it get any cuter than this!  Playing high five with Uncle Kevin

He got him!

Hard at work!  I don't think we had any cuts this year!  Corbin was a big help!

All told we pressed 16 gallons!