Birthdays Cake

CAKING IT: October is a busy month 'round these parts, at least in the birthday sense. It's Rick's birthday, my birthday and Annabelle's birthday.

We really aren't too into making cakes for ourselves, so we like to take our birthdays as an opportunity to make a cake for someone else. 

This week, we made a cake for a teen living in a homeless shelter. Like Annabelle, the girl loves to dabble in the arts. So Annabelle, our resident artist, helped make an art cake for her fellow Libra.

We often look online for ideas, but Annabelle didn't like what she saw. All of the art-themed cakes she was coming across skewed too young for a teen, she figured.

So, we came up with our own plan. We like to start with a conceptual drawing.

 

The birthday girl wanted a chocolate cake, so CJ baked a three-layer one. I made chocolate filling and added some mini chocolate chips for a little bonus surprise. 

Meanwhile, Annabelle made modeling chocolate that would be shaped into brushes, tubes of paint and more. 

Those shapes were then covered with fondant we made. 

We always have some trouble. This time it came in the shape of edible paint brushes. One broke in multiple ways while being attached to the cake. Sigh. We solved that by making it shorter and stronger. In the end, we were the only ones who would ever know that it wasn't the original piece. (Well, if you're reading this, I guess you know, too.)

FYI, on the photo at the top of the post, I Photoshopped the birthday girl's name, for anonymity. 

 

Sporty

GET KRAKEN: This week has been a little bit sports-focused. Which is normal in non-pandemic times, but it's an anomaly now.

Monday night, after two years of being on a waiting list, we had the opportunity to get in on season tickets for the new National Hockey League franchise in Seattle, the Kraken.

We had a Zoom meeting Monday night with a Kraken sales rep and chose our seats. It's super exciting. We were lucky to get in on the deal. We were number 3,200-something out of 15,000 or so who were in the 'first' tier of people wanting season tickets, and there are another 50,000 or so on the second tier waiting list.

We had to do our homework and crunch numbers ahead of time, finding the seats that worked for us and our budget.

We settled for the Red Line plan, and some aisle seats we hope are great. It's kind of weird buying seats like that for a venue you've never set foot in, but #thanksCOVID, it was what it was.

BASEBALL BRUSH: Saturday, we went to the Mariners' stadium. Unfortunately, not for a ballgame, but to pick up a couple of Seat Fleet cut outs. 

The 'Seat Fleet' was a way to represent your fandom in the park when we couldn't actually be in the park.

For around $30, you could have a photo cutout placed in a seat at the field, silently rooting for the home team.

Fortunately, there was free and easy parking just south of the stadium when we went to pick up the first pair.

Signs showed us the way to our familiar faces.

Fortunately, the pick up was well organized and we didn't have to wait too long.

We picked up Rick and Ken, also known as Jay Buhner and Norm Charlton circa 1995, in short order. These were their Halloween costumes that year. The height of Mariners fever, they scored lots of candy that year.

Today, Christian picked up the rest of the kids.

I envy these cut outs and their ballpark time this year. The Ms didn't win enough, as usual, but there are some exciting up and comers on the team. I hope we get to see them in person next year.

Quick Update

THE COUNTDOWN'S ON: Like so many others, we are counting down the days until the election. We decided to do so literally and I ordered a DIY advent calendar.

Annabelle used her Cricut to cut out numbers for the drawers. She also cut out letters for the sentiment in the middle of the calendar.

Now, we just need to figure out what to put in the little drawers. I bought some chocolate coins tonight at Winco. They are blue foil with an eagle on one side and John F. Kennedy on the other side. I thought they would be perfect! I was wrong. They're just a tad too big, darn it. Now we have 50 blue foil covered coins we don't need and nothing for our little drawers. The search continues.

TRAGEDY: Remember me crowing about finally having one little pumpkin growing in our garden? We were so excited.

Well, yeah, pox on that. I took the dogs out yesterday morning and went to check on our pumpkin and found it has become detached from the vine. Nooooooooo!

I'm blaming the dogs. They like to walk along the wall and I'll be one of them knocked it off the vine. Drat!

In happier news, we do still have a few flowers around, including a couple of dahlias, some poppies, the clover is blooming again, among other bright spots. We also picked a couple dozen more tiny red tomatoes.

So there's our gardening round up. 

And So It Continues

DIGGING IT: So, here we are again, blogging about nothing other than planting stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with planting, per se, but there are WHOLE lot of things we'd like to be doing in addition to that, but COVID. Sigh.

Anyway, a few weeks ago a friend messaged me a photo of a cute pumpkin planter stuffed with succulents. I tucked that away in my mind and this week we go around to creating some of our own.

We scored a couple of cute, vibrantly orange pumpkins for $2 apiece at Grocery Outlet. We hollowed those out.

Then we filled them with potting soil and went 'shopping' in our yard, where there are so many succulents growing.

I don't have photos of our scavenging, but I do have photos of the finished product. Below is CJ's planter. Isn't it pretty?

And here's Annabelle's succulent stuffed pumpkin. So pretty!

SCIENCE CLASS: CJ has started his sophomore year of college. One of his classes is biology. There are a few things about the course that are already red flags for me, but I'm trying to stay open minded.

In the meantime, the kids started a controlled experiment today involving planting and growing mung beans.

The first step was potting soil in four pots.

The dirt was supposed to be within an inch of the pot's top.

The mung beans were planted at a precise depth,

The seeds are germinating even as we 'speak.' Once they sprout, there will be some controls and variables employed. 

Signs of the Times

PLUGGING ALONG: This week, we've been doing the best we can with what we have to work with. We have no Internet, and two adults who are working at home and two kids who need to do schooling 'online.'

We have limped along with our hot spots on our phones, thanks to T-Mobile. (I really am going to write them a thank you letter.)

Amidst all this, the kids entered an online art show sponsored by the Renton Arts Commission. The call asked students to share art based on their COVID experiences. 

By the way, it's worth noting they were submitted before our anti-masker in chief was diagnosed with COVID-19.

Here's what CJ shared. ... (I encourage you to click on the image to see its larger version.)

"These word clouds, shaped like the contiguous USA, contrast the terminology and vocabulary used by current President Donald Trump as compared to mainstream media reporting on the deadly pandemic. The left word cloud is composed of two articles about the reported death toll hitting the 200,000 mark: With Flags, Crosses and Photos, Mourning 200,000 Dead from the New York Times, and We’ve reached 200,000 deaths. Our response has gotten even worse than it was at 100,000 from the Washington Post. Meanwhile, the right word cloud is composed of two speeches given by Trump: On the Coronavirus Pandemic, given by Trump on March 11, and the speech he gave at the ill-fated Tulsa rally on June 20, which highly likely resulted in the COVID-19 death of Republican politician Herman Cain."

Below is what Annabelle cared to share. (Again, I would click on the image to see it in a larger scale.)

"Title: COVIDland
My visual arts entry sums up a slice of my life during the COVID-19 pandemic. My family (and others) have taken to playing many more board games to pass our pandemic times. That led me to imagine this COVID inspired parody of a classic board game, Candyland. Gloppy the chocolate swamp monster becomes Germy, who's made of hand sanitizer. Mr. Mint, or rather Mr. Mask, is complying with guidelines and wearing a face covering when in public. It was a lot of fun coming up with these silly puns in these unsettling times."

 

Spoke too Soon

LITTLE GREENIE: A couple of days ago I was lamenting the end of our gardening season and the fact that we haven't a single squash.

Imagine my surprise yesterday when taking the dogs out for their morning water when I spied this little green guy.

THE GREAT PUMPKIN!!!

It's pathetic, but we'll take it! 

CUT THE CORD: A little hiccough here. ... We worked so hard Saturday helping make 80+ meals for Teen Feed, all I wanted to do Sunday was sit and watch football. I was preparing to do just that for the Seahawks' kickoff when we lost signal.

It happened to coincide with our neighbor going gangster on trimming a tree where our fiber optic cable runs. :(

Well, accidents happen, and so we call, chat and text CenturyLink to find out they can't have a repair person out here for EIGHT DAYS!

Um, Christian and I both work at home and our kids are both doing distance learning, with CJ's college starting today. That's not acceptable.

However, that's what it is after repeated please for help. Awful, horrible and terribly inconvenient.

For now, we're limping by with hotspots on our phones, paying more for our T - Mobile, but that's not sustainable. 

$#&+@ pandemic.

So, expect even less blogging from now to who knows when. It's all via my phone for now.

Feeding Frenzy

SEASON'S FLEETING: Because of the pandemic, which means we can't go much of anywhere or do much of anything, this has pretty much turned into a gardening blog, and, ironically, it wasn't a great year for growing around here.

Our squash blossoms will be nothing more than pretty flowers, our tomatoes were small and skewed green. We had a big storm blow in at the end of last week, so I had the kids go out and pick what they could before the rains came. Guess some green tomato salsa is in our future.

TEEN TIME: This week included the fourth Saturday of the month, which meant another Teen Feed dinner. Our contribution included the kids making a couple dozen snickerdoodle cookies (they made a batch of 'regular' and a batch of vegan).

Big ol' burritos were on the menu, so we cranked out 20 pounds of chicken (Kennedy contributed another 10 pounds), and a couple friends provided even more protein. We also made four pounds of refried beans, bought dozens of tortillas and big bags of chips. (The side to the burrito was a box of nachos.)

Saturday morning we made 80 little cups of jalapenos. 

We also filled dozens of kinda big cups of salsa.

We packed the Fit to the gills and headed north about 4:30. We were the clean and prep team, staying at the shelter kitchen until about 6 p.m., when the meal service crew came in. 

Thanks to everyone's generous donations, the kitchen crew reported being able to make 120 burrito meals. Yay team!

RERUN: We posted here awhile back about a captivating presentation we sat in on, "Hidden Child of the Holocaust Shares His Story." It featured Peter Metzelaar telling his tale of being a Jewish child in hiding during WWII in Europe. You can now  watch a recording of that event on The Museum of Flight's YouTube channel.

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You can also listen to an interview with Peter on the museum's podcast, Flight Deck, from back in March

FAR OUT FILMS: The Museum of Flight recently announced their participation in CineSpace, a virtual film screening presented by NASA and the Houston Cinema Arts Society. It features a collection of the best short films created by filmmakers of all ages. 

CineSpace is a short film competition created by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in partnership with the Houston Cinema Arts Society. Amateur and professional filmmakers share their works inspired by, and using, actual NASA imagery.

You can watch the event via the musuem's website. It runs Oct. 4-10. Registration is here: https://form.jotform.com/202585852675163

We're looking forward to checking it out.