To pass the time until we can move into our rental, Kort surprised me today and took me out to Inner Space Caverns in Georgetown - a privately owned series of caves in the Austin area. Kort was last there when he was a few years old with his parents, and the caves occupy a special place in his memory. He remembers being in the gift shop, riding atop his father's shoulders and reaching out to try and grab a forgotten item on display. In the process, he knocked over a bunch of Mexican jumping beans that made a mess, spilling onto the slatted wood floor. Mexican jumping beans jump because there is a larva inside the bean that is alive. So people do not actually eat the beans. And actually the "beans" are not beans at all, but seeds.

There were no beans today at the gift shop, but all else remained essentially the same. We took a guided tour that took us about a mile into the caves which run directly under Interstate 35 and open up to a major fault line.



This is the original excavation hole that was made to explore the sink hole, when drillbits used in excavating the roads continually broke off and disappeared into the caverns.

Leaving Seattle

Kort and I packed up and left Seattle last Tuesday. One of the last things that we did was to take the Tibetan prayer flags down from the back porch.


And to take down the windchimes that made music outside our bathroom window.


We spent our last night in Seattle at Carol and Geo's. I insisted that we leave the blind up, so that every time I woke up in the middle of the night, I could look out onto the Puget Sound and let the beauty fill me. I am sad to leave Seattle. This is no small transition.


We drove through Washington, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, covering 12 hours of driving a day. The first night we stayed in Ogden, Utah, a town west of Moab. We found decent sushi in the town square. Visited Zenshin and JB in ABQ, had one night in Dallas, and then headed here to Austin, where we are until we move into rental housing on Thursday.

New contact specs as of Thursday:

1350 N LBJ Dr., #737
San Marcos, TX 78666-3818

Serious Pacific NW withdrawal and aggravated pitta hot allergic mess.

How in the heck can it be that there is no Austin edition of Daily Candy?

Yoga scripts

"Relax the hair."
"Relax the ankles."
"Let relaxation drip down your wrists."
"Roll the heart open."

Two uses for eggs

1) Place a raw, uncracked egg in each of the four corners of whatever room you are trying to smudge. If the eggs cook, you know that you are cleansing some bad juju.

2) Roll a hardboiled egg over a bruise. The egg will pick up the black and blue of your bruise.

In both cases, do not eat eggs after using.

Kort and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary last week. We have actually been together since 1998, but I took a long time to get on board with marriage.


To celebrate, we planned a trip to the Olympic Peninsula - specifically Neah Bay, a small native reservation on the western tip.


The rock formations at Neah Bay remind me of the abstracted rock shapes in Yehlio, Taiwan.


We hiked to Cape Flattery, the most western point in the continental U.S. where there are amazing views.


And were very very lucky to be overlooking the Cape when a whale surfaced.


After saying farewell to Neah Bay, we traveled through Port Angeles and ferried back over to the mainland and detoured through Edison to see friends.


Randy and Jenny just bought a vintage Airstream trailer which they are in the process of rehabbing. Carpets have been torn out and the trailer will be refloored with wood laminate recycled flooring from the Carver gym of the university at Bellingham. The electric signage points actually to the Sugar Shack, not the Airstream.


aka the writing studio and headquarters of Foreign American Pictures. Shack blueprint courtesy of Ready Made Magazine; reappropriated lumber courtesy of The Lucky Dumpster.

I will miss this area and the friends we made here (none of whom were actually from Seattle!). Linh, Andy, Sophia, Saleem, Sam, Nicole, Carol, Geo, etc. The water and the beauty of this place.

New adventures await...

Packing every day for the past week means needing to take some breaks to stay sane. So yesterday I went over to the Urban Craft Uprising event at the Seattle Center. The choice of the Seattle Center's Exhibition Hall building felt like a strange one. The hall was far from full, with a lot of space around the fair to walk the perimeter of the room, and big pockets of unused space - compounded by the density of hundreds of visitors packed into what must have been about 6-8 rows of what was about 50-75 vendors.

I didn't take photos as a lot of these craft artists have original ideas, designs and concepts that I imagine at least some of them being propietary about. Popular trends noted: plush and crochet toys and dolls in food shapes with faces such as marshmallows, cookies, and cotton candy, hardboiled eggs, and drumsticks. Shmancy does a lot with pins of empanada turnovers, hardboiled eggs, carrots, and fortune cookies. I really liked this idea - soft handmade toys with a touch of creativity to coax children into eating or trying new foods. Comfort food.

My favorite find, which I didn't buy, but was meanly tempted to, was a rollable pouch targeted towards kids. The best comparison I can make is to picture a rolled cloth that has a holder for a variety of tools - Kort's got such a pouch for his chakra energy tuning forks. Each fork fits snugly into its own niche within this fabric pouch which can then be rolled up to make the tools easily portable. Picture this design applied on a smaller scale, to a set of children's crayons. Colorful printed cotton cloth decorated with cars and trains holding seven individual crayons in place. Portable, light, and secure.

The jewelry makers I saw are doing a lot with objects encased in resin, glass buttons and marbles as rings/neckalces. The best jewelry I saw was made by Faryn Davis of Fernworks who embeds fern fragments, leaves and other natural materials into her one-of-a-kind pieces.