Beetle Eyes

A Salamander? In Washington?

This little guy was on the side of our house this week. I’ve seen salamanders in Florida, but not in Washington. I did some Internet research and they are here. I think this might be a Western Redback Salamander.

Happy Fourth of July

I hope you have a wonderful Fourth of July. The above photo is from a trip to Port Hadlock, Washington that we took yesterday.

Is It Safe?

As I wrote about earlier, we use Hulu for a lot of our television. It works great. We hardly notice its biggest drawback, the fact that television shows aren’t available for viewing on Hulu until they day after they air. We’re big fans of Lost and Dancing With the Stars. So this week we’ve been afraid to look at the news, blogs or Facebook for fear that we’d read spoilers.

Lost aired its series finale on Sunday. We got to see it on Monday and we loved it. The ending was controversial, but even people that didn’t like the way the show ended loved this moment:

Last night we learned what most of you knew on Tuesday. We learned who won the latest season of Dancing With The Stars.

Tall Ships in Port Townsend

The Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain are in Port Townsend. On Thursday we toured the Lady Washington. Today we watched from shore while the ships engaged in a mock battle.

Tall Ships

Mock Battle

Five Links

New Dress A Day – This blog went immediately to my favorites list. Can one woman, armed with creativity and $365, come up with a new outfit every day for a year? You’ll never look at thrift shop clothes in the same way after seeing her creations.

Chocolate Bread – I’ve been busy over at Bread Machine Diva. One of my most recent experiments is in chocolate bread. I’ve made two different kinds, but this is my favorite.

Chocolate Bread

Sourdough Starter Tips – I’ve been dreaming about sourdough. Sourdough bread. Sourdough pancakes. Evidently sourdough isn’t as difficult to care for as I imagined.

Taste Test Your Wine – As you may know, the Man of the House is also the Washington Winemaker. We periodically try different wines to help is figure out what we like, what we don’t like and what sort of wine we should try to make next. Taste tests are a great way to help us figure this out. Don’t you need a group of people to do blind taste tests? Nope. As the Man of the House explains, taste tests can be done with as few as two people.

You are what you do all day - This article about life’s compound interest will make you think about how your goals relate to your daily to-do list. Running short on dinner conversation? Ask your friends and family about this idea and see what they think.

Beautiful Mystery Bush

In the back of the house, where no one ever goes, I found this beautiful bush. I’m not sure what sort of a plant it is, but I’m very glad that I decided to take a walk behind the house.

Grey Gardens

Recently I watched Grey Gardens. It’s a disturbing, yet fascinating, documentary about “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little Edie”. These relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis live in their dilapidated mansion named Grey Gardens. The documentary was filmed in 1975 and it shows the two women living in appalling conditions, fighting over things that happened years ago and trapped in their own world.

Here’s a clip from the movie:

After watching the movie I vowed . . .

to have a clean house
if raccoons ever live in my attic I will remove them and not bring them loaves of bread to eat
to value litter boxes and change them frequently
to socialize more to make sure that I don’t go all Little Edie
to live in the present
to have a clean house

And despite it all, I think that if I ever would have met Little Edie that we would have been friends. She had a bizarre fashion sense, but the woman had style. She was lost in the past, but seemed to see the general human condition with clarity. Yes, we would have been friends. I just wouldn’t have spent much time inside her house.

TV in the Forest

When we lived in Bellevue we got our TV via satellite and watched it with the help of our very handy DVR. The picture was great. We had lots of channels. The DVR made watching and recording TV shows a snap.

Then we moved to the forest.

Because of the many, many trees surrounding our rental home we can no longer get a satellite signal. We now have a three part system for watching TV.

Antenna – The rental house came with a working television antenna. My family gave us converter boxes and we were set. Because of the many, many trees we only get one channel reliably. However it was enough to get the Man of the House through most of football season.
Hulu.com – Our Internet service is marginal, but it’s just fast enough for us to watch TV on the Internet. Hulu is where we watch most of our online TV. We registered and told Hulu our favorite shows. When there’s a new episode it lets us know and provides a handy interface for watching the show.
The Man of the House is very handy and was able to link my laptop to the television set. So even though we’re watching TV via the Internet, we still view it on our television set.
Netflix – For $15.99 a month Netflix will send us two DVDs at a time. When we lived in town, we didn’t go to many movies and we didn’t have any premium channels. So we’re going a little wild with Netflix. We’ve watched Deadwood, Julie & Julia, True Blood, Quantum of Solace and loads of other shows.They also have shows that you can watch instantly on the Internet. So we link up my laptop and the TV and watch the Netflix shows on the big screen. For instance, they have Lost available to watch instantly. As the series winds up its final year it’s been a pleasure to see season one again.

This works so well that when we find a house to buy we may not get satellite TV again. As long as we’ve got a fast Internet connection and at least one live channel with football, we’re good.

Beetle Eyes

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