busy!

Hello everyone!
Sorry it’s been so long since we’ve updated. Jenny and I have both been really busy. Jenny’s been doing lots of freelance graphic design projects…and I’ve been…sleeping. For some reason I’ve just been exhausted lately, I blame the grey winter weather.
I managed to take a couple nice pictures of our room/bed, so at least you know where I spend most of my time.

It’s been below freezing at night here lately, and pretty close to freezing during the day as well! I’m just waiting with my fingers crossed for SNOW!

contact paper is my favorite

Today is my day off, so I decided to tackle a corner of the kitchen that has been making me crazy: the tea corner.
First of all, I’m glad to live in a house with a tea corner, it shows we are civilised and genteel young women. However, the state of the corner speaks differently.

I’ve been wanting to put some kind of little shelf in there so the tea can take up less space, and can look more organized. I had thought of building one from wood, but I have no wood lying around right now, nor any nails. Fortunately, as I was taking out the recycling, I found a small shoebox.
I covered it in wood-grain contact paper (the best goodwill find EVER), and voila! A little shelf.

This took all of fifteen minutes, and was really pretty simple. It could have been more difficult if I had cared that the grain all go the same direction, but I don’t mind the incongruity.
An added bonus is the fact that the box is the perfect height for our tall canisters of tea.
Three cheers for an orderly tea corner!

motivation…

Yesterday I was so motivated to go out and work toward my goals…but today all I want is to sit in a comfy tea room and have someone bring me tea and scones and cream. With the weather being so cold, and the light being so dim/shortlived I’ve been sleeping more and more. I guess I’m like a hibernating bear.
Fortunately I’m motivated enough to care for my houseplants… here’s a picture of the first blossom on the paperwhites. These flowers used to grow of their own accord outside my house in California. I love their sweet, fresh scent and the contrast of the white flowers with the grassy green stalks. This one grew up much faster than I expected in our apartment. I hope you like it.

dove mobile

I hung this mobile up in our room recently, and while I was iffy about it at first, It’s growing on me. The doves are white ceramic, made in Mexico, and the mobile was a gift from my grandfather to my mother when she was a newlywed. It’s designed to be a windchime, but I don’t care for the sound it makes, so it’s nice to have it indoors.

I wish the picture showed the warm, creamy colors in the ceramic and in our room, but seattle light in November is pretty cool. I’ll try photographing our room with artificial light sometime, that might work better.

bus drama!

Seattle buses are generally the best I’ve ever been on¹. They run pretty close to on time, they are kept clean², and they go almost³ everywhere you want to go. Okay, they’re not ideal, and I’m a typical American who grew up driving everywhere and is spoiled beyond belief. But these buses are usually good enough and I’m usually pretty happy to ride them. It’s not like I have any alternative anyway.

That said, today was a ridiculous bus day.

Janelle and I decided that we would go to Five Spot for brunch. We got on the bus, and the driver was a total bitch. She treated riders like they were imbecile children, yelled out the stops in a voice fueled by rage, and then didn’t really announce that her route would be ending before we even climbed the Queen Anne Hill. She kicked us off the stopped bus and told us we were bad at listening.

Cool. We eventually made it to the restaurant, and it was delicious. The whole trip up there made it seem like we were on a pilgrimage for eggs, which I guess we kind of were. The coffee was plentiful, the banana-chocolate-chip coffeecake was as badass as it sounds, and the eggs were divine. On an unrelated note, the businessmen next to us kept talking about what catfish eat, how lutefisk is prepared, and all sorts of disgusting fish names. Like “the slimer.” I think they were just jealous that our food came before theirs and they wanted to ruin our meals. Jerks.

The bus drama wouldn’t be drama if there was just one bitchy driver- that’s just not too unusual.

We got on the bus to go back to downtown, and as we neared our destination, the bus stuttered. It would go for a couple feet, then choke up and do things that seemed like it wanted to switch gears or move to Hawaii or dance around like an old person. At our next stop (we made it!) the driver announced that “this bus ain’t goin’ nowhere” and off we all filed. Janelle said that we were like bus refugees, because our new bus was overcrowded and they probably didn’t want us on there.

And that’s the story of today’s bus drama. Hopefully riding the bus will be more uneventful from a functionality point of view from now on. I appreciate crazy people on the bus⁴, they entertain me and will probably not stop anytime soon, but when the bus just doesn’t take us to where we want to go, then it’s serious bus drama!

¹ in America
² Unless it’s the weekend and after dark.
³ They don’t reach Ikea, Target, Discovery Park, or the Woodland Zoo easily though and these are all fun places I would like to go to but cannot.
⁴ One time two older gentlemen were smack-talking and working each other up to a fight, planning place and time, their voices getting louder with each threat. I thought they would just start fighting on the bus, but the driver made one of them get off. He then announced that Elvis had left the building. This is the best kind of bus drama.

fall photos

I’ve been thinking about what to tell the world about Seattle but I’m at a loss. Earlier this fall, when I had free time and the weather was still nice, I wandered around our neighborhood and took some photos. Some of them turned out.

hello

Welcome to owltea, our new blog about our new life.
Jenny and I live in Seattle, and this is a blog about our home mostly, but also about our adventures.

some older things

We’ve been meaning to start this blog for a couple months now, so there are a few pictures and thoughts saved up. I’ll go through these slowly.
Here is a sweet pumpkin I saw at the zoo. The Seattle Zoo had an event in which they fed pumpkins to almost all the animals a day or two before halloween. Some friends and I braved the morning cold to see hippos gobbling pumpkins. While the hippos were less epic than we had hoped, the zoo was pleasant in the morning with fewer people around, and we saw several little kids in their halloween costumes! Throughout the zoo were carved pumpkins, most of them had animal faces, but this one, (I -heart- pie!) was my favorite. Nerd.