The Lake

It's no secret that one of the best perks of this ramshackle house is the proximity of Green Lake.  Green Lake is, in my opinion, one of the best parks in Seattle.  As my mother recently said "it's like Central Park without the skyscrapers".  So true.  I go running there at least a couple of times a week and it never fails to delight me.

My favorite part of spring at the lake is duckling season!  I've been taking photos of them for a couple of months now so I thought I should share some of my favorites. 

 

This is the quintessential duckling shot.  Gorgeous tree trailing in the water, blue skies reflected in the lake, ducklings so tiny they can barely be seen as they blend in with their surroundings.

Slightly more visible clutch of ducklings but look how tiny!  Each one no bigger than a baseball.  Cheep cheep cheep!

This winter, an old big leaf maple along the lake path cracked in half and had to be cut down.  Every three days or so since then, some mystery tree lover has come to update this shrine with whatever flowers are in season.  Camellias were the flower of the day this time:

Beautiful.  The lake community never fails to impress me.  

One last photo of balls of fluff that paddle around and cheep loudly?  OK, twist my arm!

A wee flotilla!  Welcome to the lake, ducklings!  I hope you love it as much as I do.

Memorial Day!

I hope you all had a wonderful Memorial Day!  We had a fantastic weekend camping on Whidbey Island with the newest addition to our family.  Her name is Brunhilda, she is a Volkswagen Vanagon Carat model, meaning she has the adorable flip-up table and fold-down bed, but not the pop top.  As far as camping goes, this is glamping (glamour-camping) for sure! 

My picture taking was a little sub-par.  I was too busy drinking chilled champagne (yay for coolers) out of real glasses (yay for fancy picnic baskets) and admiring the water views from our campsite.  We camped at the Island County Fairgrounds (oddly enough) but it had everything we could possibly ask for.  Namely: bathrooms, a water view, and a BUNNY SANCTUARY.  If you've read this blog long enough, you know that I have a real soft spot for bunnies.  Somehow, the Island County Fairgrounds have become a bunny sanctuary.  There are "Bunny Safe Zone, No Chasing!" signs and there are bunnies everywhere!

Bunnies frolicking with the picnic tables.

Bunnies hanging out in the road.

This was our favorite bunny, tiny and black.  He was so cute, we almost scooped him up and smuggled him home. 

I did a whole lot of this:

Reading on a blanket in the sunshine, does it get any more summery than this?  The champagne glass and picnic basket are just out of view, but don't worry, they were never far from reach. 

We went to the drive-in movies one night, which was so fabulous I forgot cameras existed.  Sorry! We also went to an amazing farmers market/nursery with a giant tunnel of yellow viburnum:

And spent a lot of time by the water's edge:

If you're pondering a trip to Whidbey in the near future, I highly recommend it.  The ferry is easy, the views are incredible, the islanders are friendly.  Welcome to summer, I think we're starting off right!

Peonies

Peonies are the most luxuriant flower on earth, I think.  Amazingly enough, they are also seem to be one of the easiest to grow.  This year, we have a bumper crop.

This one was my favorite.  She grew very tall and had to be cut and brought inside. 

So beautiful!

Once this one is gone, my living room will never be as gorgeous again!

We have others in varying shades of white and pink...

 

This is one of the tubers that is the same root stock as the ones from my wedding bouquet.  I can tell our anniversary must be close!

It's almost sad to cut them, but for their own health some of the tall ones have to come indoors.  Some of them are waist high!

I took this photo at dusk (otherwise known as Nature's Instagram).  Gorgeous peonies, I wish you could stay forever!

I hope you all can seize the very short peony season and enjoy these beauties while you can.  Their sweet-smelling palest-pink lushness is guaranteed to add gorgeousness to any room you put them in.  Happy summer!

Spring Improvements

The homefront has been quiet lately.  The sun has lured us outside and our projects are languishing.  That said, we did manage to make two furnishing improvements that are driving me out of my damn mind with fabulousness.

One: the hall.  Otherwise known as the Portal of the Jagged Hole or the Part of the Wall that I Kicked in With Thighs of Steel, the hallway here has uneven flooring that desperately needs to be covered with a rug. 

For about a year we've been making do with a white Ikea rug folded in half.  The pros of this plan were that when company was coming you could fold the dirty outside to the inside and pretend like the rug was always white!  Sneaky.  The cons were that pretty soon none of the four sides of the rug was white.  Example:

Oh classy.  So then there was a moment of divine intervention.  My wonderful and talented friend Miss Anna is actually a professional rug designer.  I know, right?  My friends are really cool.  So there came this amazing day where her rugs were featured on Joss and Main.  A friend of mine had her designs on Joss and Main!  Eek!  I was already a member, so I ogled the goodies, ran over to show the husband and we managed to agree on one in the space of five minutes.  Done!  We didn't even measure it and yet behold the awesomeness:

OK, you can still see a tiny smidge of ugly floor but SO. MUCH. BETTER.  (Again, with the new title for this blog.)  The rug is a wonderful navy tone with a palette of blues and greys and it fits so perfectly I can hardly stand it.  SO much better than the cotton folded ghettoness that previously lived here.  So thanks to Miss Anna for saving the hallway.

In the kitchen, we had lived with a dire assortment of mismatched chairs for too long.  Two red Ikea chairs (red being my least favorite color, awesome) were plunked in there with two hideous oak monstrosities that had unspeakable atrocities perpetrated on them by the renovation.  Although it certainly wasn't the chairs' fault that someone stood on them to paint/stain/gut a small animal, it certainly didn't make them more attractive.  Case in point:

Ugh.  (Actually, the oak ones look fairly clean in this photo.  Shortly thereafter I think every chemical in the foreground was spilled on them and it was downhill from there.)

I've been trolling Craigslist for the perfect thing and finally a slightly odd option came up, a bunch of folding wooden chairs from 1941.  But I liked the lines and the mechanical engineer in me loved the mechanism.  The other chief engineer agreed so we brought them home:

Whee!  I love how they're lower backed so they don't take up as much visual room, but most of all I love that they match and they aren't red.  Whee!  It's the little things in life.  Individually they look like this:

They have an amazing four-bar linkage action (nerd alert!), so they fold into an amazingly slim package:

They were made by the American Seating Company, which is still in business in Grand Rapids.  Made in 1941, right at the beginning of wartime, they could have been for a church basement or for a super secret Army headquarters, who knows? 

And the industrial engineeringy hardware makes me happy.

OK, so not as exciting as a total makeover, but still.  You wanna come over and pretend like we're taking an Army briefing?  Give me a call!

Spring! Easter! Pastels! YAY!

Y'all, this post really can speak mostly for itself.  First it was spring!

From our window:

In our backyard:

At the lake:

Then, it was Easter.  The Easter Bunny came to our house and brought me a Hello Kitty Easter basket filled with champagne and chocolate.  (Smart bunny.)  Somehow he also invited in a flock of chenille chicks...

The chicks clearly ran rampant over the kitchen, and had a particularly good time with the un-dyed eggs ready for brunch. 

Once the chicks were suitably evicted from the edibles, we threw an amazing Easter brunch outside. 

 

Wherein some really amazing pastels were worn:

 

Spring, pastels, bunnies, and brunch.  All my favorite things.  Perhaps I should just rename this post YAY! 

Reason #497

So many reasons to love this house.  Reason #497 circles around the objects contained in our house, many of which are vintage hand-me-downs.  They improve our quotidian lives with their grace and beauty.

Case in point:

These are silver teaspoons from some long-lost relative of my husband's.  Each one is no more than three or four inches long.  Monogrammed, elegant, tiny, light.  Beautiful.  Reason #497 to be grateful.

Book Nookie

Somehow, using a diminutive on the word "nook" made sense in my head.  I now realize that it makes our tiny and adorable new book nook sound slightly naughty.  That's ok, it'll always be book nookie to me.

Being married to a carpenter is sometimes totally magical.  You come home one day and new things have materialized in your life!  (Don't get me wrong, being married to a carpenter can totally suck when you just want to get something DONE, and homeboy is being a perfectionist.)  But sometimes it. is. awesome.  This past week was one of those times.  Wanna see what he just knocked together in his spare time?

Gah!  Adorable built-in style bookshelf.  See how he brought the trim around on the bottom?  So luscious!  This is in the nook (nookie, nookette?) on one side of our bedroom.  Full nook view looks like this:

Love it!  With the chaise in the mix:

That corner of our bedroom is looking better every day.

Fred made this bookshelf specially to hold our children's books collection.  Yes, I realize we haven't actually procreated yet.  But we both have a soft spot in our hearts for the formative literature of our childhoods.  Put those well-loved tomes together with a bunch of books inherited from Fred's wonderful grandmother, and suddenly you can fill a bookshelf.  Want to see some of the vintage gems?

Yeah, that's right, we inherited a bunch of Black Stallion books.  "The Black Stallion's Sulky Colt?"  Yes, I know you're jealous, and yes, you can borrow it.  The other side looks like this:

Vintage Anne of Green Gables?  Love it!  I was ecstatic to see some Frances Hodgson Burnett books in the hand-me-down box, they were always my favorite when I was a little girl and these copies are lovely, lovely bookery, circa 1918.  

The window in the nook looks directly out onto our flowering cherry tree, so I immediately wanted a good spot to sit in there.  Although we're still working on the perfect cushion solution, we used an extra couch cushion and a few others we had lying around to make a little nest.

Wanna check out the view?

Beautiful!  So there you have it, the brand new book nookie.  Doesn't it just make you want to curl up and read?  Pretty sure I'm about to have some good quality time just the cherry blossoms, Anne of Green Gables, and me.