It was lovely having the Portland Sasses up. Earl ended up fixing tons of things for us! Thanks Earl!!! He fixed our droopy gutter, tackled our scary morning glory invasion, fixed the hole in the side of the house from where we took out an vent duct from the old stove (he fixed the venting on the new stove when we moved in a couple years ago), got rid of the yellowjacket nest (which was in the ground in our rosebed—it was the size of a soccer ball!), vacuumed the van, fixed the lightbulb in the bathroom and fixed the plumbing in the toilet (which broke the morning they were leaving!). Wow. We thank you so much for helping our little home stay running!

Evan came back on Monday. It is nice to have him home again! Trumpet camp was a complete success! YAY! The kids are doing great, and things are starting to ramp up faster into the school year. Zoey will be in the Inventors class at preschool. Keegan will be doing the Little Gym all year. We are signing up Zoey for more art classes for the Fall and then ballet starting up again in January, I think.

Summer has been great so far! We did some things, saw some people, played some music, had free time, took naps, and even watched some movies! Two more weeks of summer!

As for Grandpa Earl, he cleaned the gutters and fixed the one in the front that previously waterfalled right on the walkway every time it rained. He then rewired an outlet and added one for Rona’s copier down in her art room. He even organized my messy messy workbench. He did these latter projects despite having come down with a cold. It seems like only I have developed cold symptoms, and mine aren’t that bad. Grandpa Earl is feeling pretty crummy, though, so they took off this morning for home. Thank you both so much for all you did to help us out!

Our other visitors have included Aunty Nicole, who brought us some of Tim‘s homemade Chicago-style deepdish pizza. (Deeee-licious! Thanks!) She also was kind enough to hold Baby Keegan for us while we had lunch. Aunty Angela dropped by with some Korean seaweed soup for Rona, which is helping her feel so much better! Let’s see… Grandpa Robert and Grandma Barb came over with delicious New York style pizza, and they both held Keegan for us too. This afternoon Monica (who introduced us and officiated at our wedding) stopped by to do up Keegan’s astrological chart. I had to leave in the middle of the astral report, but I’m pretty sure he’s a Taurus with a Capricorn moon. Or something. Rona can do a more accurate star chart update when she feels up to it.

Aunty Junko will hopefully be stopping by soon to meet Keegan, and Brian and his crew are going to stop by tomorrow with food and baby holding arms.

If you’ve stopped by and I forgot to mention it, my apologies. For now, Rona and Keegan are sleeping down the hall, Murphee is pacing restlessly, and Ballerina Zoey (or perhaps Princess Marvelous, her superhero persona) wants me to read her a story. I have more photos to post, hopefully tonight. Here’s one:

I’ve caught up on some work I’ve been unable to do the past five days, and it’s time to crash. Let’s see if I can bring myself to turn out the lights…

Tonight as I headed up the hill to let Murphee out and give her dinner, the only thing I could smell was wood smoke. The shop / station / stand corner was dark, as were the houses, and most importantly our house. Our power went out at 11pm on Thursday night during the big storm. Want to see exactly why? Here’s a photo from the Seattle Times home page, taken on the street that leads up the hill straight into our little neighborhood of dead end cul-de-sacs. (Those are two really big trees resting peacefully on our power lines.)

We have our own photos of these trees, that Rona took on Friday past the “Road Closed” sign and over the “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape when we were trying leave the hill, but they are trapped on the camera’s hard drive until we have power or juggle enough technology around to someplace else that does. I’m currently at HotWire cafe in Shoreline’s North City neighborhood. I spent the day hanging out with Zoey in the van and various places with lights, heat, and food while Rona taught, and then Rona and Zoey headed off to spend some time together and I popped away to make sure the Internet was still here.

So, we’re all fine, if a bit cold and squinty, and hopefully we’ll have power soon. But—sadly—I’m fairly certain that no one is doing anything about those trees and our power lines yet. We’re closing in on 48 hours without power, and I wouldn’t be surprised if our neighborhood were dark for another couple days.

Tomorrow morning we’re grabbing Murphee and Zoey and heading for the ferry to Lopez Island, for Hanukkah fun at Grandma Arlene’s house. She’s got lights, she’s got heat, she’s got food and a washer ‘n’ dryer and Hanukkah candles for Zoey to help light (and then blow out like she likes to do), and we are so there. Hopefully our power will be restored on Monday when we get back.

A quick power-outage Zoey anecdote since I can’t post photos of her at the moment:
This morning when we were all trying to get ready to leave the house, Zoey decided that she needed to go on a mission to find batteries. She announced this fact while I was about to claim ownership of the toasty warm shower (thank you gas water heater!), and then said, "Wish me luck!" and marched out of the room with her little flashlight clutched in her hand like a sword. Ah, our brave little adventurer…

So, in the morning we’ll be off to Lopez Island, with fond hopes for a bright, toasty return on Monday. Wish us luck!

More important than that, though, is our working refrigerator! The Sears guy game over today and fixed it up lickety-split. Turns out the thermostat was on the blink, which caused the water tank to freeze over, which caused the water and ice dispensers to stop working and the freezer to stop freezing, and the fridge to stop fridging. He replaced the thermostat, and it had already started cooling down in there by the time he left. Before he left, though, I showed him my freezer door crayon hack, which he liked quite a bit. He unscrewed the switch from the top of the freezer and used one styrofoam packing peanut and some duct tape to push the switch itself down to ensure contact with the top of the freezer door. (Which is basically the same hack as mine, but backwards and hidden from view.)

The Sears guy was nice, our food is cold, and all is well.

And here it is full size.

Note the crib mattress is underneath to catch her in case she falls out. I hope she doesn’t fall out. We have the big protector thingy that goes under the mattress and sticks up like a wall, but I think she will be okay without it. We can always use it later.

Her old paint job.

Here is what we found. Yuck. Mold?

So, we decided to paint pronto. Over the past several months I had been looking at painting and decorating books and magazines for kids’ rooms. We decided to go with something bright. We can always paint it again in a few years when she decides that she hates it.

Disney’s Sonic Boom Green and Disney’s Main Street Lights Yellow.

Plus to make it interesting, we will be adding wall border. Tinkerbell. Awwwww.

We are still doing the touch up painting. It was hard to cover that plum wall. I think we ended up with 2 or 3 primer coats and three yellow coats just on that wall. Since Zoey got booted out of her room, she has been sleeping on her crib mattress on the floor in the guest room. She is doing really well with it. So, we thought this will be a good transition in to a big girl bed. We have been on the lookout for a twin bed frame and twin mattress. We have narrowed it down to a slat bed of some sort with big drawers under the bed.

Here she is enjoying the guest bed.

Lightning on the 4th of July

Brian mentioned that he wished he could see the lighting + fireworks images a lot larger. Because I care, I’ve posted the original photos to flickr, neither cropped nor size-reduced, which means they’re 3008 pixels by 2000 pixels, at 300 dpi. Enjoy!

(As seen in my set 4th of July Fireworks + Lightning.)

Well, last night was the Fourth of July, and we returned home from our Oregon Coast vacation (more on that later) to discover we had an incredible 180° view of both private and official fireworks displays from Lynnwood to Kirkland. We set up the tripod for the camera after trying out some (of course) blurry hand-held shots, and not only did we get some great shots of fireworks, we also captured several with lightning as well! I’ve created a Flickr set of the fireworks shots with lightning, so please check it out. (And Mom and Dad, I guess you’re off the hook about the lightning every time we’re in Portland—clearly we brought it with us!)

Murphee didn’t like the thunder/fireworks combo, but Zoey slept through the whole amazing display.

Oregon was a blast, and we’ll be posting a whole bunch of vacation photos, so stay tuned!

I’ve been doing a little investigation and experimentation off and on, and tonight I had my eureka moment. I noticed a couple days ago that the light in the front of the door, located in the same recessed area as the water and ice dispensers, is similarly affected—if you flip its switch nothing happens, unless you happen to also be pushing in on the freezer door. Then the light goes on and off with the switch. This led me to the conclusion that the switch inside the freezer, which determines whether the door is shut or open, was faulty. The water and ice dispensers aren’t supposed to work if the door is open, after all, so if the switch is bad at noticing whether the door is open or closed, the dispensers will be bad at working.

Tonight I was poking around in the freezer to demonstrate my theory to Rona, when I remembered something. When we were looking at the house to buy it, we noticed that there was a pen duct-taped to the inside top of the freezer door. We assumed that this was so an overzealous organizer of a previous owner could label his or her frozen goods using a convenient, if chilly, pen. We removed the bizarrely-placed pen when we were moving in.

I realized that an object about the thickness of a pen, if secured to the top of the freezer door on the inside, would raise the profile of the freezer door just enough to firmly close the switch, thus enabling the freezer door water features to function as they should.

One red crayon and one piece of packing tape later, and my theory is proved and I’m drinking water from a bottle which was, for once, really easy to fill.

Exhibit A: The Bad Switch

Exhibit B: The Quick Fix