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One of our friends that we met at Kripalu, Sarah, is in Seattle for a medical conference so we got to hang out Friday night. We went to a happy hour downtown and then went to Banya 5 to hang out in the sauna. Afterwards we hit the happy hour at the Pink Door for some awesome pizza.

The sauna is Russian style and it’s around 210 F on the upper benches. If you really want to get hot, you can beat yourself with supple oak branches. Then you go jump in the cold dip, and then it’s on to soak in the tepid salt water pool. It’s a rush.

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This time, the berries are from our own back yard: blackberries. Kim picked the blackberries and we made more jam. We got a different kind of pectin, supposedly more natural that allowed us to use less sugar. I don’t know if it’ll taste as good though. Boiling berries is kind of a weird thing to do, but I guess it works.

Kim and I went to an Aikido class at the dojo near where I work. I can’t remember the name right now, but I’m sure I’ll mention it if I continue to go there. (more…)

I just found out about a new online service called Audioscrobbler that keeps track of what music you listen to. Most music players do this now, but I think it’s much more interesting when you can view the data on the web. (more…)

• Listening To: Mike Doughty

Kim and I just made peanut butter with our new food processor. We made the healthy, needs to be refridgerated kind where you just use peanuts and a tiny bit of salt. You just throw the peanuts and salt into the food processor for about 5 minutes and it turns it to butter. We made it chunky by throwing a handful of peanuts in at the end and then just chopping them a little. Tasty.

I’ve been wanting some more features for my writing, like categorization, someplace to put extra pages like my resume, more security settings, and just being able to tinker with php. (more…)

• Watching: That 70's Show

Friday night Jacob, Travis, Kim and I took Jacob’s new boat out on Lake Washington. We didn’t do much boating because we couldn’t find a place to dock the boat near a barbeque. Jesse and Deborah showed up later and ate with us too. Then we went back to Jacob and Travis’s apartment to have kind of a farewall Travis party. Anna and Phil came later too.

Saturday, Kim and I went out climbing at exit 38 with Kim’s new girl friend Jesse. I lead four climbs including a 5.10a, and Kim led three. After climbing we met up with Jacob for more boating. This time we got to spend a lot of time on the boat, tubing and sight seeing. I was on the tube for a long time and the water was kind of rough, so I’m really sore today. It’s a really fun little boat that Jacob has. It can sit four people comfortably and it goes pretty darn fast.

• Playing: Donkey Kong Jungle Beat
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Kim, Preston and I drove to an organic farm near Monroe on Sunday to pick berries. We only got a few blueberries, but we got a bunch of marionberries and raspberries, all for $1/lb. When Kim and I got home we made some really good jam. I can’t belive how much sugar is used to make jam.

Kim and I went to Volunteer Park this Saturday to see some plays. We saw the Three Musketeers first. Fun sword fights. Then we stuck around for The Tempest. It was a really fun interpretation of a Shakespeare play. The weather was great too.

Jake, Kim and I took off for another weekend adventure near Mount St Helens, this time to go caving. We left early Saturday morning and drove for around 4 hours to get to Ape Caves. There was a tour group leaving as we got there so we joined it. It started out with about 15 boy scouts on the tour but they left almost immediately to do their own thing, thankfully. We first hiked the lower caves section and had to crawl to get to the very end. Then we turned around and headed for the harder upper section hike. There were a lot fewer people doing this section, which was nice, but it still definitely wasn’t secluded. There was some scrambling over rocks and one tall rock wall that was probably the equivalent of a VB gym boulder route. It was fun to hike around three miles underground.

Once we hiked back to the car we drove up a forest service road and found a place to camp. It looks like it was a site that hunters had been using. They had even built their own outhouse out of tarps. We couldn’t get a fire started with all the wet wood, and it was cold for July! It was down in the upper 40′s that night. We fell asleep and heard rumblings from the distance that we were a little worried might be the volcano, but I didn’t see anything in the news about activity. It rained all night and was cold and wet the next morning so we headed back early Sunday.