Our Pileated Woodpecker

We are lucky enough to have at least two Pileated Woodpeckers frequent out backyard, but up until now it has been nearly impossible to snap a photo of one. However, they must have been feeling generous around Thanksgiving time, or really hungry, because this time when we went out, they didn't fly off as soon as we opened the back door.

We often refer to the Pileated Woodpeckers as pterodactyl because they are so large in size.  You can kind of get a sense of it in this photo -- look how he/she is large enough that the bird feeder tilts, and after he/she leaves, the bird feeder sways for quite some time.  They really enjoy the suet that we put out for them.

Here is it after it bit off a chunk of suet; if you look closely, you can see it has a chunk in its mouth.

A nice side shot of the woodpecker...

And this shot shows off the brilliant red head -- it definitely catches your eye when looking out in the backyard.  Many times it is the red that makes me look again.

Harp Parents

After Thanksgiving, we had through Sunday to enjoy our time off with Mom and Dad Harp.  On Friday, we decided to head up north to Chuckanut Drive on the coast near Bellingham.  It was a decent day, not overly sunny, but not raining either, and not too cold.  We stopped at The Oyster Bar just as you start up Chuckanut Drive to have lunch.  After that, we simply drove the rest of the road, did some shopping in a gift shop near Bellingham, and then looped around back home.

 

On Saturday, we went to Molbaks, then lunch at The Commons, ran some errands, and went to dinner at Le Grand Bistro Americain.  The dogs sat at home and watched squirrels!

On Sunday, we relaxed, watched some movies, and cooked up a killer steak dinner at home!

 

The weather started to turn a little more wintery Sunday afternoon, and we wondered if Mom and Dad would be able to make it over the passes Monday morning.  Fortunately, the weather wasn't quite as bad as they had predicted and the folks headed out and made it home safely!

 

Thanksgiving Day

Mom and Dad Harp arrived last night, and after getting settled in with a good night's rest, we were ready for Thanksgiving Dinner!  Most of us spent the first half of the day relaxing while Kristina worked away preparing dinner!  This year, there was Turkey on the menu... we know Mom loves turkey on Thanksgiving.  Also, Kristina had found a recipe for corn bread stuffing just for Mom since she always has fond memories of corn bread stuffing when she was a kid.  To round it out, we had cream peas, mashed potatoes, cranberries, and fresh dinner rolls!

And here's the corn bread stuffing (with smoked oysters)...

And the amazing clover leaf dinner rolls!

It was an amazing spread!  And if that wasnt' enough, there was pumpkin pie and cherry pie for dessert!

 

Even the dogs got some special treats...

Shadow of Mordor

The game Jared has been working on since we moved here to Washington has finally been announced! Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is the title, and as the title suggests, it is a game with its roots in Middle-Earth, a setting made famous by the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.  However, this game tells a unique story that is not part of those books, but does draw heavily from the lesser known lore of Middle-Earth.

Jared is the Lead Graphics Engineer on the project and is super excited to finally have it out in the media and officially able to talk about what he has been working on!  It's not done yet, but it is definitely getting close.

The game was announced today via press release from Warner Brothers as well as donning the cover of the December issue of Game Informer magazine!

Go Monolith!

Power Outage

Upon moving to Woodinville, we had both heard stories about the power going out for LONG periods of time.  Normally when the power goes out, it is caused by a tree and since there are lots of big trees around, it usually takes some time to restore the power.  We had been lucky thus far because we hadn't had to endure really any long outage...until yesterday.

Electricity went off around 11:15am.  We had left the house around 10:45am to go get a late breakfast or early lunch and when we arrived to downtown Woodinville, it was DARK.  All of the power was out.  We told ourselves that we were pretty lucky that ours was still on, so we headed home.  On our way home though, we came to the conclusion that our power was out now too.  And sure enough, when we got home, it was.  We thought it would be no big deal based on past experience.

With the electricity out, we didn't know when it would come back on and we were worried about the sump pump – because of course it was raining and with no electricity, you know what that means – water in the crawlspace.  After a few hours of playing board games…Kristina was in heaven - she loves board games -- Jared decided that he should get the generator out.  We bought a new generator over a year ago, but we haven’t gotten it installed into the electrical panel yet – you know how that goes, everything else seems to take precedence.  Jared put oil and gas in it, and it started right up.  Then he put up the canopy we bought for it (out on the deck), wheeled the generator up there and at least got the sump pump going.  The generator is fairly powerful, so the only problem with running it was noise.  We also plugged in our frigs for a while to make sure they stayed cool.

Thank goodness for the GAS fireplace and GAS hot water heater.  We went to bed around 10pm last night, and then at 4:15am (we hadn't set the clocks back yet) all of the electricity came back on and the septic pump alarm and sump pump alarms were going off – telling us that they needed to pump.  Don’t get me wrong, it was nice that the electricity came back on, but alarms going off all over the place was not a good way to wake up.  So, we attended to all of that and went back to sleep for another 4 hours or so.  Clocks have been set back and we now seem to be getting back to normal.  Only bad thing is that we have everything piled into today to get done (cleaning, yardwork, errands, etc...).

By the way, power was out to more than 125K people – hardest hit was northern King County.  The winds were crazy – more than 60mph at times – they even shut the 520 bridge between Seattle and the Eastside due to high winds and high waves for TWO HOURS.  All of Woody was without power, Duvall, Redmond, Bothell, some of Kirkland…it was fairly widespread.  This morning when we got up, the news said that more than 13K people still had no power.  Yuk!

October Rain

We can't believe October has already come and gone.  As far as Octobers go, this one was a dry one.  We only registered 1.27" of rain here in Woodinville, while weather.com reports that the average is 4.78".  What we lacked in rain, we definitely made up for it in FOG.  The weather people started referring to October as FOGtober.  That's how bad it was.  We did manage to get a few sunny afternoons in there, so it definitely could have been worse.  If our past experiences are any indicator, November will MORE than make up for the lack of rain -- although you wouldn't know it was a dry month because everything was fairly green, except for the leaves changing colors!