The weekend

Although I was suffering from a sinus/migraine problem during the weekend, we had a great time with the Michigan parents.

First, some pictures from Friday’s trip to the Market. Tulips were everywhere!

Friday was also a truly gorgeous day – it was so warm and sunny that I even wore sandals. Here are some shots looking west across Puget Sound.Saturday, we got a bit of a slow start heading up to Whidbey Island. We rode the ferry over (what a short ride!) and then had lunch at this cute place in Langley. After that, we went to the very lovely Bed and Breakfast. And, yes, there were goats, as promised.The goat eats my sweatshirt. Bad goat!

Sunday we returned to Seattle via Deception Pass State Park after having lunch in Coupeville. It was so beautiful in the park! I definitely want to do some camping there this summer.

More Japanese media blogging

Here is a photo of the very young Princess Aiko skiing.

Spring visitors

My brother and his girlfriend were up here visiting last week, and now Mike’s parents are here. Seattle in the spring is nice for visitors, Seattle in the summer is awesome; How come no one ever wants to visit in December?

It’s been fairly nice in Seattle lately – still rainy and cold some days, but with a few nice and warm-ish sunny days mixed in. The flowers are in bloom and spring and is definitely on the way.

Here are some tulips from Pike Place Market.

And some cherry tree blossoms from the UW campus. Not quite like Japan, but still very nice.This week, the Michigan parents are in, and we’re heading to the Market again, for a picnic at Discovery Park, for a walk beside the water in West Seattle, and then to Whidbey Island. I’m especially excited to go Whidbey Island because I hear that Deception Pass State Park is supposed to be beautiful. It's also possible that we'll see some more tulips.

St. President

This is a combo post.

First, are you in the market for a presidential candidate? Have I got a candidate for you! My brother is running for student body president of UC Berkeley. This is even better if you actually go to Berkeley and can vote for him (grad students can vote in the election, I'm told). If you don't go to Berkeley, you can encourage your friends who go there to vote in the election. The good news is that anyone can check out his website!

And, now, my St. Patrick's Day baking project. I made filled Irish cream cupcakes. I didn't go for the Bailey's, since it was too expensive. Instead, I used St. Brendan's to no obvious difference. I again used the recipe from this book. Unlike the champagne recipe I used for New Year's, these cupcakes definitely tasted like Irish cream. Thus, I think that next time I make these, I would skip the Irish cream filling. I think I'm really just not a filled cupcake person - I felt like the texture was all wrong, and I just wanted the filling to be chocolate, not Irish cream. So maybe chocolate ganache filling would be okay, but Irish cream vanilla filling wasn't. I used the fudge frosting recipe from the cookbook, substituting bittersweet chocolate for semi-sweet chocolate. The frosting was good, but it took two batches to frost all the cupcakes. I topped the cupcakes with watercress (sort of like 4 leaf clovers?), but the watercress soon went limp, so this wasn't the greatest idea. Perhaps next year I should use gummy worms?

I read it for the pictures

National Geographic, that is.

But this month there's an absolutely fascinating article on the origins of Disneyworld and the shifting demographics of Orlando. Seriously.

This article might even renew my faith in the magazine, which was sort of wavering since they no longer give out the free maps and seem to be more interested in the science stories than the stories about ancient cultures.

Snowshoeing

Last weekend we went snowshoeing with the Wellesley club here.

I’d only been snowshoeing once before in my life, so I was excited that this activity included a guided tour with a ranger. Anybody can do this trip – it wasn’t any sort of special event or anything, but I gather the reservations are hard to get. The event was free, although there was a $10 donation requested per person, and they provided the snowshoes.

We started from the Steven's Pass Ski Area - my first time there. We spent about 1.5 hours hining through lightly falling snow. Our destination was Grace Lakes, a series of small lakes. The lakes didn't look like much, just flat, snowy fields.

Here are some pictures.

(The picture above is a bit blurry because I took it through a ziplock bag [trying to keep my camera sheltered from the falling snow]. I actually kind of like the effect since I think it makes the forest look a little mysterious.)

(It's definitely worth enlarging the picture above so you can read the signs. We turned around at this point.)

Nerd Camp

While Kate skiied, I attended a dissertation workshop in California. It was quite an intense workshop. There were 12 PhD students, and the workshop actually resembled summer camp in a lot of ways (Kate called the workshop "nerd camp"). We had roommates, and they rang a big bell before meals. The Ph.D. students also bonded really nicely -- I feel like I made a lot of new friends. On the first full day of the workshop we each had to be completely silent for 30 minutes while the group discussed our dissertation projects (we had all read 10 page abstracts of one anothers' projects). This was quite strange, but not as bad as I had feared. On the second full day, we each got to lead a discussion of our own dissertations, and on the third day there were limited activities, and we got to go and play. I joined the largest group, and we went hiking. Here are some pictures:

Vail!

This holiday weekend, Mike and I went in different directions. I’ll let him share what he did (hopefully with pictures!) later, but for now, it’s all me . . . .

Friday evening I took off for Denver, meeting my relatives from San Francisco for a 2-hour drive to Vail, where we’d all rendezvous with my Cheyenne relatives and their son, who is at CSU. Perfect plan, no?

Enter Mother Nature. A massive snowstorm/blizzard/windgust/white-out/avalanche warning situation turned what should have been a short drive into a six hour drive! We spent at least two of those hours in a traffic jam, creeping along at a pace that wouldn’t even shame the slowest snail. We moved so slowly that people’s (front-wheel drive) cars actually got stuck in the middle of the freeway while “driving.” I totally thought we’d be spending the night SQUISHED in the car (five of us plus ski gear = one tight fit) out there on the interstate. When we finally did get to the head of things, there were several cars just sitting perpendicular to the line of traffic, plus an RV (like, really, why would you even *think* you could drive your RV through this??? As if.). Big props to my uncle who drove fearlessly through all that! Also, a big thanks to my brother and Mike who both answered my panicked cell phone calls regarding road conditions.

So, we arrived at Vail around 4am. Only one of us was hearty enough to get up and hit the slopes at 8am. It was not, uh, me. I skied the half day that day, and then a full day Sunday. Despite the mess on Friday night, by Saturday morning the weather was perfect: not too cold, and really sunny.

And Vail is sooooo beautiful. Just amazing. Tons of big bowls, jagged peaks, and green trees (also some silvery aspens for contrast).

And it was so fun to ski with my cousins and aunt and uncle. My cousin Jesse is a serious shredder, but sometimes he deigned to ski with us. So it was fun to take the whole mountain as a group.

I even brought the new camera out one day to shoot some action shots:

I also used the old camera to take some video of cousin Jesse, cousin Skye, cousin Emilia, Aunt Polly, and Uncle Mitchell. Here’s more video, shot from a slightly different angle. Just kidding - the video is coming just as soon as I get the technical help uploading it.

My last day, I didn’t want to shell out the big bucks for full-day lift ticket since I needed to leave Vail around 1pm to catch my flight home, so I hung with Pru and Tom instead. Tom and I went snowshoeing while Pru cross country skied. The trails crisscrossed each other, so we got to see plenty of Pru!

I had a wonderful time – the company was good, the weather was good (after the initial woes), and the mountain was just amazing. What a great little getaway!

Love in the time of Kisses

I’ve been a bit busy lately and didn’t have the time to go all-out for Valentine’s Day (or, as we sometimes call it, Boo-al-en-tine’s Day).

But I wanted to make Mike a little something special. And I know how much he likes peanut butter. Peanut butter was actually pretty hard to find in Japan – there was something that was like peanut foam or peanut fluff (it had the right pictures on the container, but totally the wrong density/weight). Anyway, so Mike’s been a bit peanut-deprived. Add to that the fact that I rarely make peanut butter cookies because I am just not super-wild about nuts.

So, I decided to give from the heart – especially in the sense that I would be less interested in eating the dough – and make him some of those peanut butter Hershey kiss cookies. (Okay, no pun intended with that heart comment, really).

I thought that this would be a totally simple recipe to get. But, like all (or most?) simple things, the internets greatly complicated my search. It turns out that a) you can make these cookies using Bisquick mixed with peanut butter and sweetened condensed milk (gross!), and b) there’s a raging controversy about whether you put this Hershey kiss in mid-baking or during the cooling process. Who knew?

So I gave up and went to the source: my good friend Miso’s mother. Now that I think about it, her peanut butter kiss cookies were actually the first ones of the kind that I ever ate. In college (see, I wasn’t kidding about that whole not-eating-very-many-nuts thing).

Her recipe is actually pretty cool – it works off a cookie starter base, and then you add the peanut butter to that. You can scale the starter and additional peanut butter part up or down, depending on the quantity desired. And, for the record, you put the kiss in after baking as the cookies are cooling.

While my cookies were good (from the half of one I ate), I don’t think they were as good as Miso’s mother’s. Really, this could be due to a few reasons – 1) I made a math error in scaling down the recipe, 2) I used all butter, instead of a butter-Crisco mix, 3) I used the super-natural peanut butter that has only peanuts and salt as ingredients, and/or 4) I either over- or under-cooked them, because, really, how can you tell when a cookie that starts out as a golden brown is done? I felt like my cookies were too crumbly – they didn’t form easily into balls, and they tended to fall apart when I pushed the kiss into them. I solved that last problem by letting them cool a little more than suggested before putting the kiss in. And, this morning, the cookies are perfectly fine and don’t really seem all that crumblySo, anyway, that’s what I did last night. I would definitely recommend this gift/strategy to others for Valentine’s Day.

Two of my favorite things!

Baby Emma and Daisy (the best dog ever).

First, baby Emma. Here she is, sporting her new sweater. I have no idea why the sleeves look so short - I hope that's not really the case.Second, Daisy. Her owners are still teaching her to balance things on her head. Here, she balances a frozen banana waffle from Trader Joe's.