Today the work on our backyard tree stump is complete, it’s now a salmon jumping upstream. Stan (Stanley Rill) is a great man and it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to get to know him, and what’s more, have a sculpture done by the master woodcarver. Here is the completed picture, I’ll post more in our Photo Gallery.

I’m so very excited to have Stanley Rill, master wood carver, travelling from the Olympic Peninsula over to our place to start a small project on a tree stump that we saved since April of this year. He’s been busy with other big projects and just got some free time now. The weather is cold and foggy, but he’s used to it. He also brought along Luke (I called him Lucky Luke) the dog. Will post picture when the project is complete. Shhh my wife doesn’t know this, it would be a pleasant surprise when she comes back!

Tonight we had a reservation for dinner at the Grouchy Chef restaurant in Mukilteo, across from Paine Field, in an industrial area. The most unlikely place to open a restaurant, a place cut out of a warehouse, which seems more fit for a window repair shop rather than a place where you could get a 3-course dinner served on great chinaware and white napkins. But after a real treat, we say we don’t mind of the location at all, and we hope he will stay in business for a long time to come.
What make this chef special to us are many, but most of all, it’s an echo of the dining culture that we came in contact with while vacationing in Japan a couple years ago. In Japan, grab a travel catalog, and you will see plenty of colorful advertisement pictures of vacation houses and B&B hotels that treat travelers rather well, with clean accommodation plus a western-style formal multi-course dinner included in the package. The dinners served by this one-man show is exactly this type of fare, which puts the emphasis on the food and the presentation, a cha-do of the culinary, one where, once you know the rules, you can relax and take in the taste and sight of the feast.
Come and be amazed at how efficient this chef runs his show. A small man, clean cut and rather handsome, he embodies one aspect of the Japanese character that we find rather fascinating. Just remember to make a reservation, order when he beckons to you that he’s ready to take order, order and pay at the counter, and don’t use the cloth napkin to wipe your mouth or blow your nose.

We just came back from a visit to Washington DC. We were there to visit friends and relatives but also to enjoy the Cherry Blossom Festival. As luck would have it, we arrived on Thursday night so we were able to spend the entire Friday at the Tidal Basin. And also as luck would have it, the weather gave us all a real treat of an early taste of DC summer: sunny and warm to the 80s. Which was adouble-edge sword really: the crowd was huge, my wife couldn’t handle the heat on the last day we were there, and the flowers did not last 3 days after they reached Peak Bloom (March 31).

It turned out that the Friday April 2nd was the only great day for enjoying the blooms, but it was not in the relaxing sense of the word. There was an air of hurriness, the unsatiable urge to devour as much of the scenery as possible, the rush to get that spot before someone else spoil it. Everyone was swarming along the shore, restless. The place just didn’t exude the calm and relaxing essence that cherry blossoms would bring to mind. I went with the expectations of having a day-long picnic along the tidal basin, but didn’t see much of that happening. This is probably due to the make up of the people that come here, they are mostly tourists just like us. I would imagine the cherry trees here are not as happy as their siblings in Japan.

So the next time I have a chance, we’ll go to Japan for a proper hanami picnic.

We just got back from a 17-day vacation in Japan, leaving our footprints in Chiba, Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Kawaguchiko, and Nikko. That’s a lot of places to sample for a first time trip to Japan. We’ll have our diary and pictures posted on our website on the days ahead, and linked from here.

Updated: travel log has been posted with pictures. Please go to the main website and click on Japan 2008. 

We spent a fun weekend with relatives at the new Great Wolf Lodge in Grand Mound WA, which opened this April 2008. This is the first indoor water park in the Pacific Northwest. About time this cold region got a water park that can be used year-round don’t you think? I think their location is so that they can serve both the Seattle and Portland crowds. My review on Yelp is here http://www.yelp.com/biz/great-wolf-lodge-grand-mound?rpp=40&sort_by=date_desc, scan for QT “xitrum” post of August 4th 2008.