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Thanksgiving 2017

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Our bathroom renovation couldn't really have gone any longer while still meeting the Thanksgiving deadline. The contractor needs to stop by sometime this week for a little bit of patch work, but it's done. And we love it. The pre-Thanksgiving cleanup led to a little decorating work getting done, too, which was nice.



We're running out of wall space faster than I care to think about, so I'm glad I finally claimed this spot for the print Barbara left me in her will.

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According to the RSVP list, we were supposed to have eight adults and one child, so we set up six spots at the large table and four at the small one. Even though there would be one extra, it just looked nice. Garrett and I finally got to use the awesome wine goblets I found a while back.

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I realized about a week ago that we desperately needed new chairs for the smaller table and Garrett found these on Amazon. They weren't too difficult to put together, thankfully. And nobody ended up sitting at this table anyway since one of my nieces flaked out, along with her kid. It would have been nice to see them, but an event is automatically so much calmer without a kid to watch over.

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I just needed an angle that shows how great the vertical garden's doing.

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The drinks and snacks area, which filled up quickly with treats when Garrett's parents arrived. We had several varieties of Apothic wines, which are all quite tasty. Red and Dark are my favorites.

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It was a very rainy day, but our guests remarked that as gloomy as it was outside, the lighting and skylights in our dining room still make for a very cheery environment. That was nice to hear.



Here's a photo of us with Suzi that Brian took.

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Funnily enough, this was only their second time at an American Thanksgiving, and the first one was hosted by a bunch of lesbians. I've decided no queer Thanksgiving is truly complete without some Canadians.

Here's the Snapchat tour I did to kill some time while we waited for guests.



Season of lights

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People at the marina are starting to decorate their boats, and Christmas lights at the marina are the best example I can think of to illustrate that I'm just a person who takes pictures, and not a photographer. Photographers know how to use settings to capture what they see, whereas I hold up the phone and give it a shot.



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It's a little easier to get the shot I want when the subject isn't in the water and I can get right up close.

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The hedges at the Southernmost edge of the marina were all removed but the stumps can be lovely sometimes.

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I had an extremely productive day yesterday. First I stocked up on a lot of heavy things at the store. Then I scrubbed my purple hair product residue out of the shower upstairs and cleaned the shower downstairs so I can use it until I return to my natural color. I emptied and scrubbed a bunch of litter boxes, then swept and spot cleaned downstairs before setting up the downstairs Christmas tree.



This was before I added the fence around the tree to try to keep the cats away. And unfortunately, I accidentally backed out of the really cute footage of Sam and Steve seeing the tree for the first time this year. It's such a bummer when you have a great clip and you accidentally lose it while trying to save it. Oh well. Here's another video of Steve instead.



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Gulch goodness

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Stayed in bed a little later than normal yesterday and got to Japanese Gulch just in time to set my camera up on a fence with a great view of the sky above the Boeing plant. I don't have a lot of experience there in the fall with so much daylight, and it's amazing how different the views are. The only drawback was all the other people and dogs I encountered. Driving by the lower lot on the way home, I saw it was almost completely full!


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Swimtrack

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The first part of Lip Locked 283 part 2 which I heard in the pool yesterday was a guest mix and included a track I don't remember ever hearing that totally blew me away. I'm so glad to live in a time when it's possible and quite easy to hunt something down to hear it again.

Freezing fog, a favorite

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Walking around in below-freezing weather is a little treacherous. Not just because of ice in the form of frozen puddles and creek water. Frozen gravel behaves differently, the temperature can hurt your fingers, and even the moisture in the air can make things slippery. But I still love being out in freezing fog because you see neat stuff.







Aside from the obvious stuff like the videos above, there are some great things I just couldn't get video of. When I walked under parking lot lights, I'd see frozen moisture particles in the air looking like ghostly glitter. And lots of lights around the marina which shine straight up looked like solid pillars of light. And of course all the concrete, grass, and moss was frosty and glittery. Yesterday was one day where I was a little sad when the sunrise started, because the darkness was enchanting.

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I figured correctly that the sky would be clear most of the day, so I set up a long lapse of the sun instead. This is a frame every 65 seconds for about eight hours.


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Lone wisp

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Sometimes a time lapse is so goofy and disappointing, but I still enjoy watching it for a laugh. The little wisp that floats by makes you think there's more to come, but nothing does. It's also cute to see what the birds are up to in the tree.

Cold color

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I'm starting to like winter more than before even though the later sunrise is a challenge and it takes a while to warm up. There's just an odd beauty to it that you sometimes have to look closer to find. I probably come to the same conclusion about the same time every year.

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The timing on this lapse had me walking past it after it started getting brighter out, so you can see my zip by.



One really cool part of the morning was toward the end of the walk, when I spotted two eagles. The trail wraps around this tree, and I saw one of them land, but had no idea it was meeting a second one.



These are all from Sunday. Normally on Tuesday I go to the marina, but I woke up to an air quality alert. The score in Everett was 54, but down in Mukilteo, it was 73. 19 Points is definitely worth a change in plans, even though I got back while it was still dark, having taken no photos.

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Womp womp

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I had a thought today that Thanksgiving is really repetitive, and if it's going to be the same every year, maybe every few years I could skip it and use it as an opportunity for some solo travel. But then I realized Thanksgiving is one of the busiest travel times of the year, so that's not a good idea at all.

Goodbye to shoe

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I don't think I took a photo last time I tossed a pair of walking shoes, but it usually works out to about 300 miles a pair. For about a week or so, I've thought I should toss my current pair because I could feel every rock I stepped on, but kept forgetting by the time I got home.

That's no excuse for today, though, when I saw two brand new pairs of shoes in the back of the cabinet while getting ready. I'll switch soon, I thought. Should have done it right then, though. It was pouring rain this morning, and in the first five minutes of my walk, my feet were completely soaked. I hadn't stepped in any deep puddles, but even the small ones were able to soak up through the bottom.

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They're in the garbage now.

It's strange to me that we still don't have shoe soles that don't wear out. And tires that don't need air.

A quick nap before the light comes

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Later and shorter

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The crew at Live in Everett invited me to their holiday party which they held at their new office space Thursday. They provided beverages from Toggle's Bottle Shop and food from The New Mexicans, and to facilitate meeting up with Garrett and my niece Katie, it ended up making sense to visit Toggle's and The New Mexicans before the party, too.

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I don't like to meet people at restaurants if I can avoid it, because there's not always a good place to wait. And even if they'll seat you before the whole party arrives, I think it's rude to take up the table when you're not ready to use it. Toggle's is a great place to hang out with a reasonably priced beer or cider instead. That all worked out nicely, especially since Katie can't eat dairy and a lot of what was at the party was full of cheese. Glad we took care of dinner first.

We got home pretty late, so I slept in and decided to walk at Lowell for the first time in a while. It's not a big winter spot for me because it's pretty creepy in the dark, so it was nice to be back.

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You might see this formation of birds from the first video in the time lapse below it.




I kept the walk pretty short because I didn't want to be too late getting back, though it turned out even shorter than I wanted because the path was flooded near the boat launch. The battery in the Podo lasted long enough that it kept taking pictures right up until I plugged it into the laptop.



There are a couple of pauses before I left the park because I found a lottery ticket and had to make sure it wasn't a winner. I tried to scan it for a while, but it was too wet, so I had to find the results from that draw in the app and compare. I'm still not a millionaire.

It was quite a busy day. First we had the Christmas party at the adult family home where Garrett's grandmother lives. The food, as always, was excellent, and there was tons of it.

Christmas party!

Then I had quite the adventure at the hair salon. I was there last week to turn my hair silver, which worked quite well on the hair that was previously purple. The rest wasn't porous enough from one bleaching, though, and was kind of gold instead. And the silver shampoo and conditioner I have wasn't really making a dent in that color. So we tried again yesterday. Twice. The first time, was actually kind of neat. All the shorter hair and roots of the longer part because an electric shade of greenish yellow, which was tempting to keep. But we tried again, and now everything is much more uniform, and sort of grey. We'll see what happens over the next few days as it should lighten up.

Just now, Steve cooperated perfectly with this IG Superzoom.



Merry Christmas!

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We set up the Podo and my phone, and have lots of outtakes from both. Here they are in handy video form.


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