Mielle again, sorry

I don't want my blog to start focusing only on Mielle but it turns out that a new baby is pretty much all consuming. These pictures are from Thanksgiving.

We went to the Dr. last week and man oh man she's a big girl. She's weighing in at 20 pounds 4 oz putting her at the 99.9 percentile for weight, 98.5% for head size, and 92% for height. I don't know where she gets it from. Well actually I do. Her sister was the fattest baby I've ever seen. Oh and it turns out that well calibrated cuteometer puts her squarely at the 100% level.

 

Mielle on the road, Westfalia style

 Tarah and I both took our full 3 months of FLMA leave and used some of it to go camping in our new (old) Westfalia VW camper. We were (or I should say I was) a little too adventurous I think because on this first trip to Hood River Mielle is only 3 weeks old. Tarah is a real trooper to put up with me; she's awesome. Everything went very very well except for the first day's drive which was just a little too far and we were all feeling the stress of Mielle being in the carseat for too long. My parents went with us and camped in a tent next to the van. As you can see in the second photo, there is a perfect little sleeping nook for little Mielle just next to us. She actually slept incredible well in the van. I made some spectacular crapes in the morning and we topped them with fresh organic blueberries that my parents bought from a very nice french woman near town. When asked if they were organic she was appalled at the idea of some other alternative.

Mielle is here!!!!!

Our beautiful baby Mielle was born on June 29th weighing in at 9 lbs 4 oz! Tarah is such a fricking trooper, and all that baby with no meds. The top of her little head was poking out for about an hour making me ball with excitement like a little school girl.

Little baby coming soon

We are about to have a beautiful baby girl named Mielle. She's due the 19th but Tarah thinks it will happen in the next couple of days. We are both going to take 3 months off after she's born and hope to do some - not so adventurous - traveling in our new (well new in 1984)  Westfalia camper bus. I'll post a little something about the van soon but I need to take a couple of pics first.

Expanding the Urban Garden, cedar beds

With two new raised cedar beds our urban garden has been almost doubled. One is 4x8 and the other is 4x6, giving us a total of 121 square feet with the steel beds. For simplicity I decided to go with cedar this time, even though I love the metal ones.

These beds will get full sun so we filled them with tomatoes and peppers and even an eggplant. Tarah thinks I'm being silly planting an eggplant in Seattle but we'll see.

A number of years ago when Union Street was torn up, our neighbors collected some of the original cobblestones. They've been saving them for a project that they recently decided was never going to happen, so they offered the stones to me this weekend. I used them to make a cute and very functional little set of stairs between the two new beds. 

Reflux Still

I had such a good time making the grappa with my friends still that I couldn't resist making a still of my own; plus I'm kind of a project junkie. I primarily referenced these two websites: http://homedistiller.org/ http://www.moonshine-still.com/ in designing my sill. I designed the still to reach about 90% pure alcohol but we'll see what it can really do once I have a wash (fermented alcohol of 10-20% alcohol) ready to run through it. The column is filled with stainless steel ribbon (pot scrubbers) to act as virtual plates where layers of like alcohol concentration collect. This allows a temperature gradient to be set up between the kettle and the top of the column. If all goes right, the kettle will be at the boiling temperature of a 15% ethanol/water solution and the top of the column will be at the temperature of a 90% ethanol/water solution.