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I love having a hummingbird feeder on my deck. At least 3 hummers dine at Steve’s Hummingbird Café. I frequently try to photograph them … and fail to get good pictures. However, one hummer obliged me a few days ago by hanging out on my windchime hanger/hummingbird perch* for several minutes and remaining fairly still. (*It’s actually a bicycle rack. And it does have a bike on the bottom arms.)

I took probably a dozen pictures the other day. Most didn’t turn out (the bird’s head was turned away from the camera, the light wasn’t quite right, etc.), but a few looked pretty good. The one where the bird’s head is an incredibly bright ruby-pink? It’s not color-retouched. The position of the bird’s head, the late-afternoon light, and my “trigger” finger all came together in the perfect combination.

The Boyfriend and I drove to the Mount Baker Neighborhood, parked the car, and took a stroll. We started at the intersection of S. Mt. Baker Blvd. and S. McClellan St. and headed south (I think) along Mt. Rainier Dr. S. We continued along Hunter Blvd. S., then west down to 37th Ave. S. From there we headed east up S. Court St. and wandered around back north along parts of Sierra Dr. S., Cascadia Ave. S., and Bella Vista Ave. S. until we came back to where we started. The weather was mostly overcast with some sun breaks. This part of Seattle has a lot of parks, we saw several during our walk, from a “pocket park” in the 3800 block of 37th Ave. S. to a few parks that appeared to be very large (I can’t find them on the map at the moment, though). We saw a lot of gorgeous and interesting houses — as well as some bland and run-down ones. Mount Baker is definitely worth an “explore” or two … or three …

As pleased as I am with them for introducing me to John Lautner (see this post), I’m also annoyed with them today.

I saw this article/link on the NYT site: Stalked: A Decade on the Run. My first thought was, “Scary. Must be about some man who’s stalked a woman for ten years.”

Then I noticed that the article is in the Fashion & Style section. And I thought, “Must be about some fashion designer ‘stalking’ success.”

Yeah, it’s about a man who has stalked his ex-girlfriend for the past ten years.

Stalking is “fashion”? Stalking is “style”?

Inappropriate!

Amazing find #1: The architecture of John Lautner, which I found about thanks to my daily e-mail from the New York Times. This link goes to the story and this one goes to the slideshow. “Bonding Humanity and Landscape,” the (partial) title of the article, is an apt description of Lautner’s vision and talent.

Amazing find #2: Esref Armagan, whom I found about thanks to Fark. Armagan, a Turkish painter, has been blind his entire life — he was born without eyes. This link goes to the site in the Fark snippet; this one goes to a Web site about Armagan.

Best. Coffee. EVER.

I read about cold-brewed coffee last year in the New York Times (Iced Coffee? No Sweat, 06/27/07). It sounded amazing.

When I stopped at my favorite Caffe Fiore the next day, I asked if they offered or were planning to offer cold-brewed coffee. The barista told me they were planning to offer it during the summer.

Fast forward to last weekend at the same Caffe Fiore. I noticed a sign by the espresso machine: “Organic cold-brewed coffee.”

I tried it.

It’s amazing.

Absolutely no trace of bitterness or acidity — not that Fiore’s regular, hot-brewed espresso is bitter or acidic. It isn’t, that’s why I drink it. The cold-brewed was even smoother than the regular. Thicker and … the only other adjective I can think of is, earthier. A weird word to describe coffee, I know, but it fits. The cold-brewed tasted more natural, more organic, more like — “This is what I should be drinking.”

What exactly is cold-brewed coffee? It’s coffee brewed without heat into a strong concentrate — according to an article from MSNBC (My coffee is cold, 08/20/04) use 9 cups of water for 1 pound of coffee grounds.

Add the water to the grounds and brew for 12 hours. Then strain the coffee and dilute it with hot, warm, or cold water (typically anywhere from a 1:1 to 3:1 ratio of water to coffee).

Very low tech. And, it would seem, difficult to find ready-made in coffee shops. Fiore is the only place I’ve seen that advertises cold-brewed. I’ll have to ask at Caffe Ladro, my weekday coffee place (Ladro’s close to work, and the Fiore that’s most convenient for me opens after I’ve started my commute).

If you like coffee — good coffee, not crappy mega-giant-coffee-store coffee (yep, starts with an “s,” ends with an “ucks”) — try cold-brewed. And if you try it at Caffe Fiore, “don’t freak out” (as Will the barista said) when your coffee dealer adds water to the cold coffee concentrate.

One more thing: Because it’s kept chilled or at room temperature, cold-brewed doesn’t melt the ice in an iced drink. Perfect!

Update: Caffe Ladro does cold-brewed. Woo-hoo!

Update #2: Caffe Ladro has cold, brewed coffee; not cold-brewed coffee. I.e., coffee brewed the regular way, then refrigerated; not coffee brewed without heat.

I found this somewhere on the Internet: The 20 saltiest foods in America.

According to the msnbc article, the saltiest food in America is the Chicken Portobello from Romano’s Macaroni Grill: 66 grams of fat; 1,020 calories; 7,300 milligrams of sodium. The saltiest burger (#17 on the list) is the 2/3 lb Monster Thickburger from Hardee’s: 108 grams of fat; 1,420 calories; 2,770 milligrams of sodium.

By comparison, those Burger King burgers sound almost healthy.

I’m still vegan, though.

I spent a fun, mostly sunny Saturday in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood with my friend K.

Our stops included Flying Apron [vegan, gluten-free] Bakery,

Ophelia’s Books

and Burnt Sugar.

Ophelia’s: The sign looks like an open book (that accounts for the “Clever” tag for this post). It’s more obvious from the other direction, but I would have been shooting into the sun and the photo wouldn’t have turned out.

Burnt Sugar: I like the moss growing in the cracks of the building, particularly when looking straight up from underneath it.

Flying Apron: I like the way the windows frame the trees outside and the building across the street.

Beauty is where you find it.

(Things that sound dirty, but aren’t.)

“Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food” in the Feb. 29, 2008 New York Times is about the Global Vault. The vault is a high tech, high security storage facility for all kinds of seeds from collections all over the world. The seeds are being stored as a safety net for maintaining biodiversity to mitigate the potential effects of global warming or some kind of large-scale disaster (natural, man-made or pest-induced).

Fascinating.

Fun fact: The world has 1,200 types of bananas. Wow, that’s a lot of bananas!

See the ivory hellebore flower in the background of two of these photos? I’ve had that one for a couple of years, and it’s been in the same pot for at least a year. I was surprised and happy to see the magenta hellebore buds spring up this year. I’m not sure where the magenta plant came from. I think I did have a hellebore that color once but it died three or four years ago. So maybe some remnants of it were left in the soil, or maybe a bird deposited seeds in the pot.

Either way – bonus hellebore! 🙂

“Magenta and ivory live together in perfect harmony side by side in the same container on my balcony. “ (A crappy take-off on the Stevie Wonder/Paul McCartney duet “Ebony and Ivory” from 1982.)

One of the things I love about living in Seattle: going to a beach on a sunny, late winter, almost-spring day, walking past evergreen trees, seeing beautiful blue water in the foreground and snow-capped mountains in the background.

Matthews Beach offers that view. Both a park (9300 51st Ave. NE) and a neighborhood, Matthews Beach is located on Lake Washington about two miles northeast of the University of Washington, near the Sand Point and View Ridge neighborhoods and just outside of Lake City.