Nine Pound Porter

From Manny of Georgetown Brewing:

Beer People -

Some of you have heard that we are brewing a porter this year. It is
ready! When? This Thursday. That's right, two days from today we are
debuting the Nine Pound Porter at the Nine Pound Hammer in
Georgetown. Beer goes on tap at 6:30PM. Come and say hello to the
Georgetown Brewing crew...you may even get a Nine Pound Hammer shirt.

I know this is incredibly short notice but the fact is... brewing is
not an exact science -- there is an art to it. In other words, we got
lucky. Usually when we brew a new beer, we brew it once, taste, make
adjustments, brew it again, taste, make adjustments, and then wah-
lah! We have our beer. This time... we brewed a new beer, tasted,
tasted again, poured a pint, tasted some more, then called Scott at
the Nine Pound and said "Hey Scott, when do you want your keg?" Now
I'm typing this email. burp. Mmmm.... porter.

Join us at the Nine Pound Hammer 6009 Airport Way S. Seattle at 6:30PM
this Thursday.

If you can't make it to the Nine Pound, we'll be pouring Nine Pound
Porter at the Fremont Oktoberfest this weekend and also at our retail
shop at the brewery.

Cheers!

-Manny

Blurry Photos of Our Weedy Front Yard

The reason I hardly ever post photos of my yard, even though this blog is supposed to be about "snapshots of plants," is that it's so not there yet. This year in the front we did nothing except build a small wood screen, and the back, well, the back is something we're just beginning to tackle. The lot is basically 10,500 square feet of neglect. Well, OK, maybe only 10,000 square feet of neglect and 500 square feet of somewhat gardened space. Anyway, you were warned.

The smoke tree that I will always love.



Barberry, cannas, the clematis I hate.



At some point I'm going to have to dig up these cannas in favor of the bird's nest spruce.



Japanese maple, blue oat grass, the viburnum whose growth I've stunted by never giving it any compost.



Feather grass, mondo grass. Clearly we need more ground cover.



Look -- we bought some.



The parahebe that Chuck told me was too small for its huge container (which I recently took it out of). He was right.



Yeah, not only do we have plastic lawn furniture in the front yard -- we have two totally different, totally ugly colors of it. There goes the neighborhood! There's an off chance that I'll give these unicorn plants enough water to live.



The echeverias were a container success story this year.



Raspberries in a container? Why not? They're happy enough -- they're berrying right now.



I like this little fir way better than my miniature pine.



This rosemary would probably be a lot bigger is I gave it some nice compost. Everyone else in Seattle has monster rosemary.



The little parking strip planting, post fennel massacre.



This is a happy little plant, whatever it is.



When we planted this ground cover, I don't think we realized it would turn into a fluffy pink cloud. I have to say, I sort of love it, though. Not there, but somewhere else.



The monster red dragon.





The new smoke tree. I love little purple smoke trees on top of piles of rocks.



The black elderberry, which you can hardly see but which I have high hopes for.



It's a work in progress. Gardens take a while.



I'll show you the backyard tomorrow.

Another Attic Find

Perhaps not as cool a find as the cover for the January 1959 issue of The Dude ("The magazine devoted to pleasure"), but we found this sign up in the attic today.



If this is a sign for your house and you want it, let me know. I'll hang onto it for you. (We also have a big old rambler, so we have room.)

Bridge Motel

Last night pretty much everyone in Seattle crowded into my friend Eve's brother's motel for an art party celebrating the motel's last days of existence. We picked up our friend Will on the way. He shut the door in our faces, which seemed weird; I later found out he thought we were dressed up, so when he saw us he wanted to change his clothes really fast. So I waited outside and took pictures of his yard (where The Stranger's "public intern" did some weeding for him month ago).











OK, these townhouses are right by the Bridge Motel, which is being demolished to make room for a row of similar three-story townhouses.





Here's the motel, where my husband's parents stayed on their first night in Seattle in the '60s.



Later on we saw some friends of ours, and they said they also stayed here years ago. They said the clerk asked them to confirm that they were a married couple. But that's no longer one of the rules here.





I ate some of the art.











I like this carpet, though I'd like it a lot more after a steam cleaning.



Despite having examined the state of the carpet at the motel, I did crawl around this black-light exhibit.



































Speaking of Eastern Europe, I saw a guy who lived on the same train line as me in Czech Republic in the '90s. My stop was Cernosice Mokropsy, and his was farther down, in lovely Zadni Treban.







Behind the bar, these two played Rock Paper Scissors endlessly, and each time the loser had to dance and swig bourbon. They looked like they were getting sick.





I took 16 seconds of shaky video of it.





















It started getting crowded, and we left.