Finally, I’m back from vacation and sitting at a computer once again. I can’t say that I’m thrilled about it, because vacation was absolutely blissful. Elliott and I had two full weeks with no responsibilities, no teenagers, no pets (well, except for beloved doggie, who was with us) as we cruised around the San Juan and Gulf Islands on the sailboat.

Elliott and I have been together for almost 7 years now – this was sort of like a second honeymoon, I fell in love all over again with my wonderful husband. Not that I didn’t love him before, but it’s that giddy, happy, wonderful “in love” feeling that returned so strongly when we actually got to spend time together without all of the pressures of everyday chaos.

Mostly what we did was: eat, sleep, drink, read, play cribbage, kayak, hike, play ball with the dog. I read more than I’ve gotten to read in the whole last year, with a mixed bag of fiction. It was the kayaking that I loved the most. We got these little plastic ocean kayaks this summer, and they are just so perfect for this area.

So: a couple of things….

1. E: thank you for the birthday wishes. As I told Georgette when we met for dinner before I left, it really tickles me that you always remember the happy birthday after all of these years.

2. I have news! Vamp is back!!!! I am beyond thrilled that my favorite JG reviewer of all time is back on board. We’re going to meet for dinner this weekend in Seattle to catch up. I love the way she looks at content, especially the very tiny niche kinks that I never think about. She’s totally awesome and positive. Ok, have I gushed enough?

Oh, here are some photos from the trip. We anchored for a couple of days in Tod Inlet, which is a very long, wide inlet behind the Butchart Gardens in Victoria B.C. Then you can actually access the gardens from the dock at the back, where the Japanese Gardens are. We spent a good part of an afternoon wandering there (it’s dog friendly, yay!) – Elliott’s first visit there, and my second since a highschool trip in 1985.

So this past June, JanesGuide turned 13. In web years that makes us about 130, right? The last time we did a major remodel around here was when we turned 10, so three years ago. There are things I want to change, as I started blogging about earlier in the year, but they keep getting back-burnered for other projects. I was reading this morning some commentary about how Craigslist has really NEVER changed their site look after all this time. They stay relevant because of content. I like to think that’s how this site runs, but I need to work harder on keeping the content up-to-date. Sometimes that’s difficult. For example: it’s not rare to encounter a site that disappears within the same month that they ask for a review. Keeping up with the comings and goings of tons of sites is way too time consuming.

Anyhow, I am trying to get some things caught up again. Elliott and I leave for a couple of weeks quite soon – our first vacation since I opened my little retail side-project that turned into a time and money hog. Heh – our first vacation in a couple of years, but all of a sudden we have THREE vacations booked within the next 6 months. First two weeks on the water, then Vegas in October (for a concert. Parrotheads.) then Hawaii in February – we’ll be there for our 7 year anniversary.

One thing that Elliott and I agree on after the past two years: we are going to downsize. When I say that, I am referring to downsizing our commitments. No more opening new businesses on a whim, volunteering for major time-suckage projects, etc. We will be careful in what we commit to doing. The past two years have flown by, and while they have been pleasant, I don’t feel as if I have enough to show for them.

Next week I have a dinner scheduled with an old friend. Super-long-time journal readers might remember me referring to her as “Georgette” back in the day. I’m looking forward to it, I was a bit hesitant to write her, but she was gracious and wonderful when she wrote me back. Not really a surprise, as she’s always had those personality traits. Still, it’s weird to reconnect with someone after such a long period of silence. :)

~Janie

This morning when I first woke up, Elliott surprised me by asking if I wanted to grab a ferry and visit a peony farm nearby. Since I was barely awake, and the ferry was leaving 30 minutes later, we barely made it. Seconds to spare, they were actually chaining off the ferry entrance as we drove up, but they squeezed us on. Peonies are my very favorite flower – they are so fleeting, the whole season is only about 45 days long, from late April through early June. I have 5 peony plants right now, but this trip was to see a whole bunch of different varieties, and pick some roots to plant in the fall.

These pictures were all just snapped with my iPhone (you can tell which one is Hipstamatic, I’m sure…) hence the quality. Actually, the image quality is pretty awesome for a phone, but the detail isn’t quite there. Still, the colors were not enhanced at all by me. They actually are that brilliant, some of them.

We got breakfast at a cute little place on the island, that let us have our dog with on the shaded porch. Then it was back on the ferry so Elliott could make it to a diving class.

Sooo glad to be having this little spot of sunshine in an absolutely dismal late spring.

My favorite app for my iPhone right now has to be Hipstamatic. It’s basically an app that emulates various plastic cameras, lenses, film types and gel filters. Yes, it’s silly. Yes, I could easily do any of these things in Photoshop. Still, I find it addictive to play with.

Last night, the bad weather set in, so Elliott met me at a beach nearby, with Doggie. We played ball when the rain let up, ate hamburgers in the car, took a little scenic drive, and ended up having a glass of wine at a waterfront resort. Here are some iPhone Hipstamatic pictures. :)

Most delicious dessert I’ve made in awhile was last night, and so simple:

Ingredients:

1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp cardamom
6-8 apricots, halved and pitted
1 cup creme mascarpone cheese
vanilla
honey
agave nectar

Mix 1 cup brown sugar with 1 tsp cardamom, put most in baking dish

Put halved apricots in a single layer on top of brown sugar mix, sprinkle a bit of the sugar on top

Drizzle with 2 tbsp of agave nectar

Roast at 425 for 12-15 minutes, basting with the syrup occasionally

Whip 1 cup creme mascarpone with vanilla and honey to taste

Serve the warm apricots with syrup and the mascarpone over the top.

Yes, it is a giant sugarfest, but a delicious one. Oh, and if you find red velvet apricots, it’s even prettier when you serve it.

just had to share – I don’t have much of a sweet tooth normally, but I do love fruit-based desserts.

You all know how I am by now. I come, I go. I have fits and starts. Life is good right now, let’s just start there. I’m happy, healthy, and just got myself immersed in a project for awhile. Now it’s done, and I have two other projects that I am just dipping my toe in on, but I’m going to try to be a bit more balanced, and not completely disappear from here as I have for the past few weeks.

So what’s new… hrm. I started doing acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. I found an awesome person to go to, and I feel better than I have in quite awhile. I am a huge believer in preventative versus reactive when it comes to health. A good friend of mine started going, who was already in good health for the most part, and I saw the changes it made for her, so I gave it a try. So far, I think it’s totally amazing. My energy is way up, my depression is way down (well, that already was under control, but now it’s even better!) I think I realized that I need to be more proactive with my overall health, when I found myself sitting at a dinner party discussing various ailments with everyone else, which I guess is what happens when you wake up one day to find that your social circle is all in their 40s and 50s. heh.

Signed up for a photography class that starts at the end of June. I will definitely start posting some pictures once that gets rolling, since I’ll actually be dragging a camera with me everywhere again. The class is going to focus largely on portraits, but I’m sure I’ll be taking plenty of pictures of various things. Probably you’ll be seeing a lot of my dog. hehe..

Anyhow, there is my resurface post. And if you look at my archives, I wasn’t gone NEARLY so long this time as my previous wandering-offs. :)

~Janie

So everything I’ve intended to write about lately has gone by the wayside, because of a cascade of work and life issues we’re working through all at once. Not only are we in the midst of refinancing our home (interest rates are truly crazy low right now) but we are also in the midst of re-negotiating two separate business leases, both of which have some contention. Oh, and Elliott and I started going to counseling to figure out some parenting issues. It’s tough being a step-parent at all, much less to three teenage girls who were more than half grown by the time we met.

The counseling has been a very good thing. I actually found (well, Elliott did really) a super-awesome counselor that I relate to. It’s important for me right now because with the girls getting older, I have a surprising (to me, at least) amount of emotional stuff cropping up about the loss of my own childhood when my father died at 15, and not knowing how to parent through these years since I was essentially not parented from then on. It’s really weird for me because it’s all stuff I thought I’d worked through forever ago, but now it’s all in the very different light of trying to help them move from kids living at home to self-sufficient adults.

Anyhow, I know that was kind of a ramble. Which, honestly, is kind of what my brain is like at the moment with everything that’s going on. :)

I would write more right now, but Elliott is on the phone behind me, and I keep getting distracted trying to listen to his half of a conversation about a lease… heh.

~jane

My youngest turns 16 tomorrow. She’s passed her driver’s testing, so first thing in the morning we are going to the Dept. of Licensing to pick up her driver’s license. The next stop after that is the bank, so she can open her first checking account. She’s already working (my baby is self-employed. I can’t tell you how that tickles me.) so she sometimes is paid by check. She’s excited about having an actual account. For the evening, she’s picked sushi out for a dinner celebration. She’s fairly anti-celebrate, so that’ll be the extent of it. A far cry from the middle one who last year wanted me to rent a hall, and throw her something out of MTV’s “My Super-Sweet 16″. (note: that did NOT happen, it was only requested.. heh)

Been reading tidbits from the rest of the web this morning. Matisse posted her piece on the “Whip Smart” book over at The Stranger today. Similar take, although I think she was a bit nicer than I was when I wrote mine. Not that I have changed my opinion much, and it is just that, an opinion. Then I was reading about how Melissa Febos canceled her reading at Seattle’s Center for Sex Positive Culture. I guess I was surprised that she was appearing there to begin with, since I don’t think there was much sex-positive in what she wrote. At any rate, I’m not questioning her right to speak her truth, just a surprise that she’d think everyone would embrace it.

Then I caught a bit of the discussion about Venus magazine being under new ownership. Chicago Reader did a piece on the new owner, which showed up on my radar because of people making noise about it not being “feminist” any longer. So, I was reading through the piece, which had plenty of input from the founder of Venus, as well as the women who bought it from her, and are now selling it. I am struck (as I often am when reading about what is and isn’t feminist) that the sticking point seems to be whether the magazine wants to outwardly label itself as “feminist”.

I agree wholeheartedly with the new owner, Sarah Beardsley:

That’s such a word fraught with interpretation and meaning. We don’t use that particular F word around here. It just doesn’t seem relevant.

And she’s right. Look up the term feminism in Webster’s. I don’t think there are many contemporary women, self-identifying as feminist or not, who don’t support equal rights, opportunities and compensation for women. But the interpretation and meaning have changed. I am part of the target audience, presumably, of the new Venus. I am a self-employed, self-sufficient, creative woman who doesn’t identify with what that label has become.

Is it ok to take a magazine like that, and turn it into something else? Well, it seems to have the blessing of the founder, Amy Schroeder, and that’s good enough for me.

Back from a semi-exhausting weekend. One of the teenagers had a birthday, and we were mid-trip to Seattle for her wish (a birthday shopping trip) when my practically new (2008) little car decided to overheat. Blah. Anyhow, Elliott to the rescue, which reminded me of just how much I love the PERKS of being married. Stuck on the side of the freeway, it’s not like I couldn’t take care of myself. However: it’s much nicer to call Elliott, have him show up and take care of things, than it is to call a cab and a tow-truck when I’m with 3 teenagers in the middle of farm country.

Once we finally were underway, we had a nice trip. I ended up shopping for myself too, as well as all 3 girls, because we so rarely go to ‘the big city’ and it’s nice to take advantage of far greater selection of things. :) Still, it made for a long day – left the house around 9am, got back around 9pm.

Interesting note of the day: I was updating reviews and such, and found that the very community-building software we’ve been considering to power a JanesGuide user base was what was used in a site that LOST THEIR WHOLE USER DATABASE in a massive failure. This concerns me. I need to forward that info on, because I’d hate to get a user community going only to lose everything. Of course I have in-house awesomeness when it comes to tech, so I doubt that will be an issue. It’s a little thing called backing up your data. Still…

Today has been playing catch-up on phone calls, emails and everything else. Oh, and girl-maintenance. I have a mani/pedi in an hour, something that is important to me at least. :) While the time spent is beyond dull, I do love having pretty nails.

This weekend, Natasha and her husband are coming up to visit. We decided that we should stay in, so yay! I get to cook. I do love cooking, but I’ve been stuck in an asian-fusion sort of run for awhile now. I decided this weekend to veer into different territory. I picked up an Italian cookbook (my entire cookbook cabinet doesn’t have a one – lots of thai, chinese and mexican cooking but no Italian) and I’m going to try a few new things.

Elliott wants to take a cooking class together sometime soon-ish. I think it’d be sorta fun, although I have to find one that is about spice. I like my food spicy, and that goes for just about everything, from red chili dark chocolate to putting sriracha on my scrambled eggs. Must find cooking course that emphasizes herbs and spices. :)

Anyhow, took yesterday totally off. It was really nice. When I say “totally off”, I don’t mean I was lazing around eating bonbons, but just that I didn’t do anything for ANY of the 3 businesses Elliott and I juggle between us. All I did was clean, get rid of recycling and goodwill, organize and cook. Corned beef of course, it’s my single concession to St. Patrick’s day. I never remember to wear green and I refuse to drink green beer, but I don’t mind making corned beef once a year since Elliott likes it. I personally find it kind of bland, but that’s just me.

Oh, speaking of cooking: does anyone have a good spicy yogurt dressing recipe that would go well in a rice/fish bowl? I tried to improvise my own the other day and it was an utter failure.