August 'Til Now - Light Rail!

Life's been busy. I pulled up the garlic in mid-August. Didn't get as large as my mom's typically does, but overall quite pleased with it. I've purchased some new seed garlic to plant this fall.

I went to buy basil and then decided to plant the basil in a different pot and got this Vietnamese cilantro that likes to spread to put in my last planter box. It's a little different flavor than cilantro (no soapy taste apparently for those who don't like regular cilantro), but not as finicky to grow. It grew from this:

to this in just a few weeks:

Emily re-did our dining room for us:

And we sent the kids off to summer camp, spent a week not quite sure what to do with ourselves without them around. I was anxious about having them around others again, especially since summer camps have tended to be great COVID spreading events. However, given it's a humanist/science type camp, we knew that everyone who could be vaccinated would be, camp was requiring vaccination/negative covid test, and they were sticking to outdoor activities in small groups throughout the week.

G did come down with a cold the week after they got back (we did do a covid test to be sure, especially since cross-country was starting that week). Everyone except M caught the cold and I seemed to get the worst of it, but thankfully it was just a cold and nothing worse.

While the kids were gone we enjoyed some time to watch our tv shows together again, make brunch for ourselves, get take out from some local spots, and took a trip over to Port Townsend.

We also went on a Theo tour, since neither of us had been before! The tour was definitely a little modified for covid, but interesting nonetheless. Cocoa seeds:

At Port Townsend, there was this statue/fountain. And reading the sign I had to wonder how many statues/fountains I've seen places were actually from mail-order catalogues. Also, please note that the fountain had previously been used for trained trout shows. 

Kids started up the schoolyear - back to in person, all masked, eating lunch outdoors, etc. It's definitely been a little nerve-wracking to send them back, but teachers have to be vaccinated and the schools are trying really hard to social distance as much as they can. And we do have a really high vaccination rate in our area, so that's somewhat reassuring. Remote school was really difficult for us as parents because we couldn't sit next to M all day and keep them on task - we knew we needed to go back to in person just because of that.

This weekend, the day we've been waiting for for 6 years arrived - the nearby light rail station opened! There's also a new pedestrian/bike bridge to get across I-5. G wasn't able to join us on our first light rail adventure from the new station because they had DND. But the rest of us walked down, hopped on, and headed to Capitol Hill. Capitol Hill has previously been a pain to get to because I never want to try and drive/park there and to take a bus you have to first take one downtown and then change buses to get up to Capitol Hill. Bad traffic always meant this would be an exhausting trip to make. So we just never went there. But now we can get there in 10 minutes! 

We meandered along the main arterials of Capitol Hill for a bit before heading to our destination - Optimism Brewing. Hung out there, got food from the food truck, and watched another table play a truly impressive game of Jenga. This was several turns before it fell and I honestly do not know how they kept successfully pulling pieces out.

Then we grabbed some ice cream at Molly Moon's. There are several other ice cream shops in the area that are also supposed to be good - and now that we can easily get to Capitol Hill whenever we want, we'll be able to eventually try them all! Cal Anderson Park is behind Ryan there.

We checked out the pedestrian/bike bridge a little when we came home and I rode over it today on the tandem. I'm planning on having us pick a different light rail station as our destination every so often over the next few months and just spend a few hours exploring the area around each one.