Fine and Full - What’s up with Jay and Anastasia

For Halloween this year, we carved pumpkins with our friends Lee and Sachi. Here are some photos, for your enjoyment!

My pumpkin, post carving (photo taken by Lee):

Jay’s pumpkin, lit up (it was actually quite scary, and funny too!):

My pumpkin, lit up:

All of our pumpkins, lit up:

Inspired by David’s photo of yesterday, and the bountiful harvest of today, the title of this photo is appropriately, “today’s harvest”. Now, this doesn’t mean we’ll have the same tomorrow, but wow!

It wasn’t a good year, weather-wise, here in the NW for tomatoes, but we planted “Uncle Wilfred’s” tomatoes in the our p-patch plot. Here’s the story of the tomatoes, from his niece who sells starts in the spring:

My Uncle Wilfred lived and gardened in England for over 80 years. He had the most incredible green thumb I have ever seen. Most notably THE BEST HEIRLOOM TOMATOES EVER!. They thrive in our Northwest climate, so similar to his. It took him over 50 years to perfect them, and I was thrilled when he passed them on to me.

I have to attest, that plant was very prolific! Even without too much sun, most of the fruit in the photo (not including the cherry tomatoes and a few of the ones in the back) are from this one plant! You can see it, pre-harvest here:

Now, our canning class is going to come in handy. (Oh, and Jay counted — there’s over 100 of them….)

Before I get way, way behind, I wanted to post something about our camping trip we took in June to Cape Disappointment State Park. It’s at the very south tip of the Washington Coast, right on the Pacific Ocean / Columbia River junction. Jay and I spent two nights there (too short!) in one of their cabins and had a great time exploring the park and the many beautiful hiking trails. It’s the area where Lewis & Clarke “found” the Pacific Ocean, so there’s all sorts of historic information, including a museum / interpretive center.

I’ve posted a more full set of photos here.

I’m really not trying to turn this into a cat blog or anything, but this is just too funny. Nikita has made “friends” with our raspberry bushes. Jay thinks maybe it has something to do with their proximity to the catnip and cat grass (i.e. she takes a few chomps of the grass, smells the nip, and the raspberry bushes turn into something more than they really are….) In any case, she really loves them.

It’s Nikita’s 13th birthday today, and considering we did one of her most *unfavorite* things today (vacuumed), I decided I should at least put a little tribute up for her on the blog. I’ll also give her a couple treats since she could care less about the blog. Anyways, here are a couple more photos from her kitty youth:

She still gives us this look today:

We called this her “rabbit pose” (she doesn’t really do this anymore):

This is one of my favorite portraits of her from her early years living in the country:

Happy birthday Nikita!

On Sunday, since Mary was out of town basking in the Hawaiian sun, we celebrated mother’s day with Jen, John, and Colin. Seattle gave us one of those ‘oh so beautiful’ days, where you forget about the grey and clouds and soak up the vitamin d. We went out to Discovery Park and had a picnic, then hiked down to the beach. Here are a couple photos from the day:

If the photos look a little fuzzy, they’re supposed to be that way! I took them with my plastic Diana lens with my SLR camera–my new favorite camera set-up. I’ve been posting a lot of photos recently at my photography website (www.anastasiafuller.com) taken with this lens. I’m really loving it, and loving experimenting with it.

I do this thing whenever I add a tip to receipt like this. I like to make interesting numbers and do a little math.

This is a good example: the interesting numbers are often wonderful to me!

I’m now posting a photo-a-day over at anastasiafuller.com. I started about 3 weeks ago, and plan on posting one a day through 2010; after that, we’ll see what I do with them!

So far, the photos have been from my archives, but many I’ve never shown anyone before, and throughout the year, I plan on posting new ones as well. Hope you check them out!

in London (photo by Chris Dent)

On this eve of a new decade / year, here’s a retrospective of 2009 with some of my favorite things. (This is a personal post; check out this blog post for our 2009 biz/Juxtaprose thanks!)

places visited:

• Myvatn Nature Baths, Myvatn, Iceland
• the chocolate stores, galleries, and museums of Paris, France
• wandering through London on a beautiful fall day

concerts / live performances:

• Leonard Cohen (Coachella)
• The Flaming Lips (Marymoor Park)
• Akron/Family (Bumbershoot)

album(s) (in no particular order):

• The Avett Brothers: I and Love and You
• Bill Callahan: Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
• Amadou & Miriam: Welcome to Mali
• Built to Spill: There Is No Enemy
• Yo La Tengo: Popular Songs
• Wilco: Wilco
• The Flaming Lips: Embryonic
• St. Vincent: Actor
• Rodrigo y Gabriel: 11:11
• Mr. Smolin: Bring Back the Real Don Steele
• Akron/Family: Set ‘em Wild, Set ‘em Free
• Taken By Trees: East of Eden
• Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
• Neko Case: Middle Cyclone
• Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
• Leonard Cohen: Live in London

movies (note: I didn’t check the dates; I think these were all 2009; or at least I saw them in 2009):

• Inglorious Basterds
• Man on Wire
• Up
• The Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Extract (just saw this last night; so funny!)

tv (basically didn’t watch any live tv this year; all tv shows were via web streaming / DVD; we’re still 1-2 seasons behind on some of these; shhh):

• Dollhouse
• Damages
• Mad Men
• Battlestar Gallactica (maybe not the ending, but the rest of it was very enjoyable)

books I read this year (not all from 2009; I rarely read books when they first come out):

• Revenge of the Spellmans: Lisa Lutz (the exception to the 2009 pub date; I also read the first draft of The Spellmans Strike Again (coming March 2010!)
• The Girl who Fell from the Sky: Heidi W. Durrow (one of our clients, I got a manuscript version of her book, coming February 2010—definitely keep an eye out)
• What the Dead Know: Laura Lippman
• The Maisie Dobbs series: Jacqueline Winspear
• Innocent Blood: P.D. James (I picked this up at an “English Pub” in Paris, where they had a wall full of English language books)
• The Road: Cormac McCarthy (I don’t think I’m going to ruin the book by seeing the movie)

food / dining:

• Chez Omar, Paris
• all the fresh food from our garden!
• weekly fresh salmon from the Farmer’s Market during the summer, grilled on our grill with freshly picked corn, and a bottle of wine
• John Henry’s, Palm Springs

chocolate (yes, it gets its own category):

• La Chocolaterie de Jacques Genin, Paris (no website, but check out this article)
• Chocolate Mussy, Paris (8 rue du Bourg Tibourg, Marais)

art:

• André Kertéz photography exhibit at the Reykjavik Library (Iceland)
• Ara Güler photography exhibit, Paris
• Ferdinando Scianna photography exhibit, Paris
• Photoquai 2009, Paris
• visiting the Louvre, the Rodin Museum, and seeing all the amazing art in Paris

chance meeting:

• meeting and talking with the fine art photographer Tim Rudman and his wife, Ingrid Rudman, at Lake Myvatn in Iceland; then running into them again, two days later, in a totally different part of Iceland and having another great conversation

spa experience(s):

• Olympus Spa (Lynnwood, WA) – where I spent 6 hours of my 38th birthday!
• all the hot pools of Iceland: Myvatn Nature Baths and the “swimming pools” of Husavik and Reykjavik

None of these things would have been the same had I not shared them with friends, family, a cranky cat, and “strangers” met along the way. Mostly none would have been the same without Jay (I love you!). Looking forward to more adventures in 2010 and beyond.

We had an interesting and generally great year. We thought it’d be nice to post something about how that was true for our work at Juxtaprose, and so we just published a goodbye 2009 / thank you post on our Juxtaprose blog. That post includes a photo we took today of us sitting with some of the nice swag we’ve received from clients in 2009.

Some of said swag includes the “Free Schmidt” t-shirts we received from cousin Lisa (the “Free Schmidt” t-shirts will make sense once you read The Spellmans Strike Again, which is out in March 2010). And we wanted to do a second, Spellman Files-themed, photo with just Lisa’s books from ’09 and the shirts, for her amusement. And, voilá! That’s the photo above, now included here for your amusement too!

If, after that, you’re still in a Fine & Full mood and want to read something new I’ve written on Wrong Notes, check out On Music Appreciation, which I also published today .

We are back in Seattle now, and have a few more photos to post (and stories to tell) from our unplanned extra trip to London and Brooklyn on the way home from Paris.

Our stop in Brooklyn was super brief (less than 24 hours), but we got to hang out with our friends Jonah and Nancy, which was really great.

We were totally wiped out from the extra travel (and lack of sleep required to plan it), but we had no trouble enjoying slices of pizza our morning there, before catching the flight back to Seattle—as illustrated in this photo:

Our final week in Paris, so nice, a taste of it in our Paris, week 3 photo set:

Also, Yes, we did see the Eiffel Tower (it’s even got its own photo set):

The beginning of our photo set from Versailles.

The sound of the police sirens here in Paris is really distinctive, and is to me, one of the many iconic sounds of this city.

The following sound recording captures the sound of a passing motorcade (the main car was a tiny, unmarked, Smart car—that it was a motorcade made no obvious sense to me, unless it maybe was a police escort for a woman about to give birth, on the way to the hospital).

Listen to Paris Sirens

Part of the Paris, week 2 photo set.