Monkeyshines 2012: the year of the dragon

It's Chinese New Year and in Tacoma that means magic is in the air... It's Monkeyshines time!

Not sure what I'm talking about? Here is Exit 133's article on them and here is my post on them from last year.

Judah enjoying his rabbit orb from last year and new dragon medallion

Last year, Bill found an orb during an early morning walk with the dogs. He found it outside the conservatory at Wright Park around 5:30 am. While he was doing that I was at home feeling sick and pregnant. Blech, no early morning searching for me last year.

The 2011 rabbit monkeyshines orb

This year, Bill was not inclined to get up early to walk the dogs. So, it was up to me. When Judah woke up I checked online and saw on Exit 133 that people had found some monkeyshines. I then quickly got dressed, changed Judah, and we were off. But, dammmn, it was icy! There was tons of black ice on the streets and sidewalks, so our progress was pretty slow going.

We first checked people's park and the planters around there on MLK. No luck (saw afterwards that some people reported finding marbles at peoples's , but there were out much earlier than us). We then (carefully) made our way over to Wright Park. We saw quite a few other hunters. I had been checking the landmarks in the park, but figured all the other hunters were probably doing the same. So we went off path and, wouldn't you know, we found a medallion sparklingly in the base of a tree trunk! Yay!

You can kind of see the swirls of color...

See the dragon?

That is now two years in a row that we have lucked out in Wright Park.

Judah really likes how the medallion tastes.

I am super glad we found a medallion, but, yowza, the photos I've seen so far of the orbs are crazy awesome. The artists outdid themselves.

Here is one that was posted on Exit 133

And one posted on the Exit 133's facebook page:

I'm posting this from my iPod while Judah naps in my arms. Once he is awake I'll update and add better photos... And now updated!

ipod photo

ipod photo of the medallion glowing when held in front of a light

Amber waves of... Necklace

Judah is modelling the latest in teething fashion.

We went to Best Loved Baby today and picked up this necklace. I can't say yet if it is working its hippie magic or not. I heard about the necklaces from other moms. Here's hoping the fussing will return to pre-teething levels.

Bill and I were looking through the teething necklace photos of Judah together. We each picked our favorite shot of him sitting.

1. mine

2. bill's

The necklaces are also sold on Etsy, by Spiral Mama. There are lots of other people who make them as well, but this just happens to be whose they carry at Best Loved Baby.

While shopping, something else caught my eye.

Me thinks I just might have to pick one up next time I go there (which will be in a few weeks, I'm almost out of diaper detergent). The necklace is by Chewbeads- it's made out of silicone and designed to be chewed on by babies. The real question is what color to get. They come in a rainbow of options, but, of course, I'm trying to decide between the boring colors: black, gray, white, or ivory.

images come from the Chewbeads site

Monkeyshines for Judah!

First off, my many apologies because I am posting this from my itouch. And while the itouch is good for a great number of things, writing paragraphs (or any extended typing) is not one of them. So rest assured, my numerous errors today are not based on my incompetence, but my low tolerance level for writing using only my pointer finger on a touch screen. Anyway...

It's Chinese New Year! In Tacoma something very special goes along with the new year: monkeyshines. We have searched previous years, but never were able to find any. I was really hoping this would be the year since Judah will be born in the year of the rabbit. Lucky for me, Bill gets up super early to walk the doggos before work. The last couple days he has been wearing his headlamp just in case the monkeyshines made an appearance... And today they did! Which, you know, makes sense and all since Chinese New Year didn't start until last night. Still, you never know if the monkershiners are going to get sneaky and put them out a bit early.

-Argh, I can't upload a photo from the itouch to the blog! This will be remedied later when I have my laptop at home (instead of at work where it sits now.). Sigh, blogger really needs to get with it and get an app...- Oh, yeah, there is the ancient laptop/desktop hybrid at home. It is a beast, but at least I can put up pictures!

Anyway, Bill found our pretty little orb in a planter outside the Conservatory at Wright Park. Bill thought that was pretty perfect, since we got married at the conservatory 3 years ago next month. It will be a perfect addition to Judah's room. Now I just have to figure out some way to safely and securely display it. Well, that and get Judah's room to the point where we can display anything, let alone super cool hand made guerrilla art!

We are that much closer to becoming true Tacomans. We have our BeautifulAngle posters up and, now, our very first monkeyshines. Oh, right, and we got married in one of the city's oldest parks... And we have a 106 year old home, designed by a prominent local architect... We work for 2 of the 3 largest employers in the city (school district and port)... Hmm, I'm not sure what else we need to be real Tacomans other than an accumulation of years at this point...

Here is the little cheat sheet I made for identifying the rabbit. It is a bit hard to see it in photos, since the orb is multicolored, but the rabbit is in clear glass.

A Sunday Stroll

We did not work outside today. Too sore. Too many blisters. The rest of the gravel will have to wait for next weekend.

We did, however, go for a nice walk. It felt nice to stretch out our aching muscles and Ralphie was in need of some exercise, as well. While walking I took pictures of some houses to share with you. Enjoy (hopefully). This funky Queen Anne is broken up into a couple of different units. You can’t really tell in this lighting, but it is a dusky lavender. I remember at one point when we were apartment hunting the attic unit in this place was available. It is accessible via a giant rickety looking exposed wood staircase around back. I cannot imagine carting everything up and down those stairs in the rain. I imagine the stairs must get supper slick. But, still, a really fun looking house. The second floor unit would be my pick. You get access to the turret and have a sweet balcony big enough to bbq on. The yellow house on the left has gone through some major renovations these last few years. In fact, you can still see some scaffolding up against the right side of the house. I think they have done a nice job updating the house. It looks great. I also really like their fencing, particularly the gate. When we finish fencing in our side yards I would like to add some cute gates, possibly similar to that one…

If you notice in these pictures the skies differ drastically. The weather today has alternately been gorgeous and warm with blue skies and big puffy white clouds to dark ominous massings with gusting wind and torrential downpours. Ah, spring in the PNW. This house is cute. I love the wrap around porch and bay windows. I like to imagine that the second floor balcony is off the master bedroom. How perfect would it be to drink coffee and read a book out there in the morning? Well, despite the fact that it is a Western exposure, not Eastern. Oh well, I guess drinking some wine or microbrews and watching the sunset wouldn’t be half bad either. I keep being drawn to blue houses. I just really really like them. Hurm. It is always interesting to see the basically the same house interpreted 3 different ways. Well, that is when it is a period home. If it was track housing it would be a completely different story. Ugh, track housing developments. You might find this shocking, but I like the blue one the best (You win again, blue. You always do.)This little green stucco house is so darned cute. It is unusual to see stucco painted a mint green like this. I would never think to do it, but it works here. I love the arched windows. I also really enjoy their landscaping out front.I love this house (which happens to be owned by one of my colleagues). I really like their color palette, especially the reddish brown accent color on the trim and gutters.  It really highlights the relationship between the exterior paint and the exposed brick chimney. We have talked about doing a similar palette on our house, but switching the black for dark brown, and the light green for more of a tan/cream. On our house you can only see the very top of our chimney, so I don’t know if they reddish trim would be as striking.  Then again, I do love blue houses… Well, that’s it for this weekend. Happy Spring, everyone!

Trees!

As I mentioned in Spring Cleaning, our block filled out a request to get trees from the city to put in our planting strip (the area between the sidewalk and the street). Well, the trees (15 in all) were delivered on Thursday and we had a neighborhood planting on Saturday. We had six varieties delivered: Red Maple, Sugar Maple, Oregon White Oak, Golden Locust, Silver Linden, and Jacquemont Birch. Of course, there are already quite a few trees on the block to add to species diversity such as redbuds, holly, some other ancient (and gigantic) maples, and some other trees whose names escape me.

The trees were a lot bigger than we were expecting. We had to attend a tree planting class the other weekend and the demo tree that was planted was maybe half the height of the trees we received. The Red Maples were the tallest by far, but all the trees were surprisingly substantial.

It was a lot of hard work planting and, who-doggy, was my upper body sore later that night. The hardest part, by far, was cleaning off the root ball and making sure the roots were not tangled around each other. We learned at the planting class that if you plant the tree as is from the container the roots may not know that they out of the container and will continue to wrap around instead of traveling out and creating a supportive structure. In 10-20 years the tree could just- BOOM- topple over one day because the roots had kept that original restrictive ball.  

Here are the roots of our Silver Linden after some extensive work.  We had to cut away some of the roots that were too tangled;  that is okay though, because the cuts will support new growth.

 Here is the Silver Linden all planted and ready to grow. One day it will look like this:

We also planted a Jacquemont Birch on our strip. Our first choice was a Chinese Paper Birch, but I guess they were not able to get one so we wound up with our alternate, the Jacquemont.  

Here I am working on the birch’s root ball while Bill puts the finishing touches on the hole. The birch’s roots were much easier to seperate than the linden because the birch had been kept in a bag container that had quite a bit more give and flexibility than the regular plastic container.  

It will be so nice when the trees have matured a bit. We now no longer have a treeless lot! So exciting. Now we will just have to go and purchase trees for ourselves to plan in our front, back, and side yard.

All in all our neighbors planted 8 trees on Saturday. We have 7 more still sitting in our side yard waiting to be planted… This was a nice neighborhood activity which will benefit us all for years to come.

It sure will be lovely as our trees grow and one day we will have a gorgeous tree lined street like the image above.

Screw an Easter egg hunt; I’m looking for Monkeyshines glass!

Here is one of the (many) reasons I have grown to love Tacoma over the last few years: Monkeyshines. They are a group of anonymous glass artists who gift the city with art once a year around the time of the Chinese New Year. For the last seven years they have distributed glass orbs and/or glass medallions emblazed with the corresponding animal from the Chinese zodiac.  It is basically like a giant city wide game of hide-and-seek or an Easter egg hunt, except that it is way cooler to find hand-blown glass than a person or a hardboiled egg.


Although the Chinese New Year is still a few days away, the hunt is already in full swing. The first gifts were found Tuesday morning.  This is the year of the tiger. The folks over at Exit133 found this pretty ball along with these 2 medallions downtown.


After seeing their blog post when I got home from work yesterday it took me all of 30 minutes to convince Bill to put on his shoes and coat and come search with me. We decided to check out the Evergreen Extension Campus nearby; after all, we figured there were reports of finding orbs at UWT and UPS already, so surely there has to be one somewhere at Evergreen! Alas, our search was unfruitful (but, of course, still fun).  We also got up extra early for work this morning to go search several parks within walking distance…. still no luck. They could be anywhere, which is part of the fun and part of the frustration. I dreamt last night that everywhere I looked I found one, but being the civically minded person I am (or at least like to think I am) I only took one orb and re-hid the others. Okay, I lied. In my dream I actually took one orb and one medallion, but even my dream self was able to reason that the medallion was to keep in my classroom.

We are going to try searching again tomorrow morning. Hopefully we will spot one, but even if we don’t we will still fun.

We both have Friday off so we will be able to go on a big search (when it is actually light out, what a novel concept). However, I have no idea if we are too late in the game to even have a slight chance of finding the gifted art. The whole production is quite mysterious. At this point no one knows for sure how many pieces are out there, or even if they have all been delivered! The first year they distributed 200 balls, but last year there were 600. Also, when they first started they were hidden on the eve of the Chinese New Year, but in the years following people started going out in anticipation and cherry picking the art before the city had a chance to discover and enjoy the fun., therefore they started varying the night of delivery. This year there is even speculation that they are only delivering small batches each night to extend the fun and give people more chance to search.


I talked to my students about Monkeyshines today and they became all aflutter. For the rest of the day they kept reporting that they had spotted a medallion off of school grounds (although all the sightings were false, just pop cans or other shiny bits of litter). I hope that some of them were able to get their parents in on the fun and get outside and searching.  We decided as a class that Monkeyshines exist to have fun, make Tacoma a better place, and create a community experience. 


Wish me luck. I would love nothing more than to create a post tomorrow (or the next day, or the day after that) showing off my Monkeyshines gift!

It’s a Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood

If you live in the Pacific Northwest you know that we seem to be experiencing an early Spring. I walk to work (I am a lucky girl) and every day I notice more and more plants sending up shoots, as well as, buds turning to blossoms on trees. Last weekend my husband and I (and our dog) took advantage of the unseasonable warmth and sunshine and went out for a nice long walk around some historic neighborhoods in Tacoma. I took along my little point and shoot camera to capture houses that I find inspiring.

This lovely house is just a few blocks away from our own. I just love the colors. We are constantly contemplating what we should do to our exterior. I am drawn to blues, but I just don’t know if our block could handle another blue house (there are currently 5!).

You know what makes this house even better? It is next to this fabulous Tudor. Sigh, the Tudor was on the market two year back, but far out of our price range. It just slayed me though, as it was on the route I walked from work to the bus (back when we lived in an adorable little apartment near a zoo). I’m glad that the house found a buyer and that they are treating it well. Also visible is my husband (and supposed blog co-author) and our dog.


Here is the front of the house:

It has a really good sized fenced yard, with a sort of overgrown English garden look to it. There are a good amount of trees on the lot too.

It is just crazy to have trees flowing so early! I can hardly believe it is early February, let alone that these photos were taken at the tale end of January.


Anyway, on with the house!

This mansion is insane! I am so curious about its history. You can’t really tell from this shot, but it has sweeping views of the Puget Sound, the Cascades, and Mt. Rainer. The other thing you can’t really tell from this shot is that the house seems to be falling into disrepair (or, hopefully, a very slow repair?). The other side of the house is missing a bunch roof shingles, among other things. In the 4 years I have lived in Tacoma I have yet to see any exterior improvements. Of course, I have no idea what the interior is like, but, boy, would I love to find out! I would love to see this place be turned into a bed and breakfast. I’d book a room even though it is only a mile away.

I really enjoy the Corinthian columns on this house, as well as, it being a double lot. We have Doric columns on our house, which are also great. I guess you could say I am just a big fan of columns in general. Also, you can see the backside of the mansion behind the blue house.


Originally our house was a double lot, but it was parceled off sometime after the 1920s. It would have been so glorious to have a huge yard and garden on the North side of our house instead of a duplex. Yet, then again, if it was a double lot we probably wouldn’t have been able to afford our house anyway.

Here is another exterior color scheme I really enjoy, the view of the Sound isn’t half bad either. Bonus, there are no green houses on our block! Okay, there is one really pale gray green house, but it barely even counts, plus, the owners were mentioning how they plan on painting…

Fake Bernini in Tacoma! I enjoy this way too much.

The last house of the day is directly behind our favorite bar, The Parkway Tavern. It it so unique and urban looking. The dense shrubbery out front kind of obstructs the view, but trust me, it is fantastic. Its look is very unexpected in Tacoma. I imagine it fitting in a much larger city, maybe in a block or row houses or something of that ilk. I don’t know if that is logical or not, but, whatevs. I adore this house.


My batteries started going low on me pretty early on in our walk, so the quality (and quantity) of images is not what I wanted it to be… Oh well, I can assure you, we will take more walks and Tacoma has many more beautiful houses. Perhaps, I will even take the time to wade through my photos from a weekend spent last year in Port Townsend (a town known for its Victorian architecture) and our honeymoon in ‘08 to Victoria, BC. After all, I am pretty much house bound for the next two weeks, as our big bouncy dog had major surgery this last week and he has to stay pretty much immobile for the next two weeks and needs a lot of care and attention. So, expect a lot of posts… or, at least, one or two more.