I’ve been here a week now and I’ve learned so much! The first notable thing is that I didn’t understand “muck” and now I get why people in Seattle always take their shoes off inside houses. After thinking I’d figured it out by putting a shoe rack near my front door, what I did not understand is that the entryway mat needs to accommodate muck boots (I think of Fern in Charlotte’s Web in with the pigs) and that when boots come off, there’s mud and boot everywhere. My coat rack, sitting on my wood floor, was not ready for dripping wet raincoats. So I’ve now set up a rain entrance at my kitchen door. Concrete floors in my kitchen can handle a coatrack, a wet dog and muddy boots.
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| What fashionable Seattle dogs are wearing |
New storage shelves have been added to my utility room so I went grocery shopping today and actually have room to put food in the kitchen. It’s all good! My living room sofa comes on March 1 and once I have that and I put together the daybed/guest bed in my studio (it’s from IKEA so I say that without any expectation that I’ll get it done very quickly), come visit! Here’s some photos of the house.
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| My living room, a work in progress |
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| The entryway |
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| I treated myself to these pots for the front porch for Valentine’s Day |
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| In the stairwell, the vases from the tables from Ellie’s bat mitzvah |
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| Dr Scott likes the view from the sunny room next to my bedroom |
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| My kitchen! |
Yesterday I went to a CityFruit training session to be come a master fruit tree steward. The CityFruit program brings volunteers to maintain the city’s fruit trees (unlike in MD, where we have non-fruiting cherry trees and the like, in WA there’s apple trees and pear trees dropping fruit all over the place!). The session yesterday was to learn grafting techniques and I came home with an grafted apple tree I hope to nurture into someday producing fruit!
12 of us met at the home of a fruit tree expert who lives in a backyard wildlife/plant sanctuary/farm.
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| These are espaliered fruit trees |
We were all given grafting knives and instruction on the way to make a quick, clean cut in the root stock and the scion (the new tree variety). When we all were practicing our cuts, one of the guys said it reminded him of whittling as a Boy Scout in what they called “the circle of blood.” We all managed to avoid losing any fingers. The 12 people in my session were half the cohort of volunteers for this year’s program and they were all wearing their muck books and we all got rained on during the time in the garden. Our next session is in March and we will be learning various aspects of fruit tree stewardship through October.
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| My baby apple tree, which I need to put into a pot |
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