Studio711.com – Ben Martens

A friend and I were recently talking to a third guy about the Golden Steer butcher in Bellevue. I’ve tried a lot of things from them and they are all delicious, but if you’re going there and feel overwhelmed, here are my favorite purchases in no particular order:

• Bacon hamburgers
• Bacon sausage
• Pepperoni stick
• Beef kabobs
• Boneless rib eyes
• Beef hot dogs
• Any of their brats and sausages

I’m getting hungry just thinking about this. Luckily we have a rib eye marinating in the fridge right now!

Tyla and I enjoyed watching the entire season of Treehouse Masters on Animal Planet. The shows all followed a strict formula but it was still fun to see what they came up with for each treehouse. Sidenote: it’s amazing how rude and ill-mannered rich people who want to buy treehouses can be (ie. the wife in the “Backyard Bungalow” episode.)

If you only watch one episode, check out the finale called “Love is in the Air.” Pete builds a treehouse on their own property so he gets to do exactly what he wants and wow, it’s a whopper of a treehouse! What’s even cooler for us is that we saw them building this while we were there. The film crew wasn’t there that day, but they had gotten the metal bridge supports in and were working on the main treehouse building. Pretty cool!

I’m so thankful that we stayed there last summer before this TV show hit. Even then it was nearly impossible to find an opening 6-8 months into the future and now they don’t even offer online booking or prices. You have to email them. I imagine they are flooded with requests!

My Subaru is nearing 100K. Hopefully I’ll get another few cheap years out of it, but then I’ll have a decision to make. I’m really interested in the possibility of getting an all-electric car. My commute is ~12 miles each way which seems easy for almost all the electric cars out there today. There are lots of free charging stations around the area and there are so many Teslas and Nissan Leaf’s around here that you hardly even notice them anymore.

The costs are really coming down and you can make a fairly convincing argument that you’ll finally break even on the cost after the life of the car (though people on either side of the argument will still say that’s either too conservative or too unrealistic.)

There seem to be two design ideas on the market:

1. Most companies spend a lot of money on the battery packs and provide something that will survive many charge/discharge cycles over many years. There are charging stations at many parks and businesses.
2. Tesla is building their own “super charging” stations which give you a half charge in only 20 minutes or you can do a complete automated (ROBOTS!) swap of the battery pack in 90 seconds. Charging is free. Battery packs cost about the same amount as a tank of gas.

Tesla is making cars people really want to drive with good recharging capabilities and everyone else is following an agreed-upon standard. Who’s right?

The more I use SkyDrive, the more I like it. It’s an easy way to share files between computers and devices, and it’s a great way to share files with other people. On top of all that, it’s free. At work we use the professional paid version of SkyDrive and I keep all my work documents out there.

If you’ve been using it or thinking about using it, SkyDrive will soon be disappearing. Sort of. The service will continue and the features will be the same, but the name has to change. A British company called Sky won a trademark case against Microsoft and the result is that the SkyDrive name needs to change.

We don’t yet know what the new name will be, but don’t be alarmed when it changes. It’s still going to be a great service.

Happy Birthday to the incredible mother of my son! I know it’s a little weird to say that and then use a picture of Tyla and Oskar, but I thought she’d enjoy the photo (from just after we met in 2008.) I wonder how long it will be before Elijah is as big as Oskar?

The other day I was wandering through the grocery store looking for some sweetened condensed milk and when I saw the “Carnation” brand, something clicked and I realized there was a big Nestle farm in the town of Carnation, WA. I ride past it on one of my favorite motorcycle loops.

A quick search reveals that the tie between Carnation milk and Carnation, WA is very tight. The original company started a few minutes south of here in Kent, WA but the main farm was built in what is now Carnation, WA. In the early 1900s, the farm was supposed to be a home for contented cows which produced better milk. The farm was located just outside Tolt, WA and the town was renamed Carnation, WA in honor of the company.

In 1985, Nestle acquired the Carnation company. The old farm was later turned into a training center for the company and then in 2008 it became a camp for children with serious and life threatening illnesses.

I’ll never look at that can of Carnation milk the same way again!

Last summer, Tyla and I spent the night in an amazing treehouse. While we were there, one of the owners told us that Animal Planet was filming a new reality show based on their treehouses. We never saw the show appear on TV so we figured it had been cancelled, but it’s on now! The show is called Treehouse Masters and new episodes are Friday nights. Full episodes are available online or on their mobile app.

We’ve only watched a couple episodes, but it seems like the show follows the genius behind the treehouses, Pete Nelson, as he builds treehouses for various families. The show feels like lots of other home improvement type shows, except instead of fluffy pillows and crazy paint jobs, the end result of this show is an incredible treehouse.

If you live in the area and like the show, consider spending a night in one of his creations at Treehouse Point in Fall City. It was pretty hard to book a room last summer so I imagine now it’s quite a bit harder with the show being on TV. Make sure you book well in advance!

Every situation is different. Keep that in mind as you read this entire post. I’m not trying to convince you that our way was right, but I do want to share our experience.

Tyla and I took a lot of classes leading up to Elijah’s birth. We had about 30 hours of a natural birth class that were separate from the hospital, and we also attended 4 or 5 shorter classes from the hospital. Before taking any of the classes we had decided to have our son at the hospital, but Tyla still wanted to go as natural as possible. In talking with various people inside and outside of the natural birth classes, we heard over and over again how much we’d have to fight to keep the hospital staff from intervening unnecessarily. We walked into that hospital ready to fight… but the fights never came. The methods suggested by the hospital aligned very closely with what the natural birth people said we’d have to argue for. The staff were fully on board with almost every single one of the things proposed in our class and would have done them even if we hadn’t asked.

It seems to me this area of science is going through lots of change. Imagine life before the mid-1900s: the only choice was a fully natural, unmedicated birth. Death rates for mom and baby were very high. As medical science took off in the mid-1900s, researchers were flooded with new data and technology for intervening in the birth process. The rate of intervention sky rocketed but it dramatically improved the success rates for mom and baby. Now it seems that the medical profession is starting to realize that by intervening less and in only the more critical cases, they can improve success rates even more. National C-section rates have stopped rising and are holding steady at around 1/3rd of births. In many hospitals (including Evergreen), there is a huge push to drive the rates down. I heard one unsubstantiated estimate that said a healthy C-section rate is somewhere between 10-15% which aligns with my intuition about how many times births went bad back in the old days.

As we went through the pregnancy, we sometimes wondered if we had made the right choice by going to the hospital. But I think if we had more frank discussions with our OB about how she practices medicine, I think we could have dismissed some of the antagonism coming from the natural birth people who were apparently basing their opinions on what hospitals used to be like 10-20 years ago. Who knows if we’ll have another child or what we’ll decide at that point, but right now I’d be shocked if we ended up anywhere other than Evergreen Hospital.

I wrote a post earlier explaining why a C-section was the only path toward a healthy mom and baby in our case, so I’m extremely thankful that the staff recognizes those key points where they need to intervene. But I also like the idea of letting nature run it’s course when possible and trusting the birth process to work in most cases. I’m sure by the time Elijah’s generation grows up and has children, everything will be changing again, but as long as the rates of healthy mom’s and babies declines and the rates of medical interventions decline, then I think it’s a win for everyone.

We’re hoping to head up to Vancouver, BC in a couple months and it dawned on me that we have to get Elijah across the border too!

I started doing the math about how long it would take to get a copy of his birth certificate and then get a passport. It’s going to be close. Thankfully since we are driving into Canada, it looks like we can just use his birth certificate. US Customs and Border Patrol has a very helpful website located at http://www.getyouhome.gov. Here’s the relevant info for traveling with a child:

Beginning June 1, 2009, U.S. and Canadian citizen children under age 16 arriving by land or sea from contiguous territory may also present an original or copy of his or her birth certificate, a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a Naturalization Certificate, or a Canadian Citizenship Card.

I’ve seen other sites (though not as official) indicate that if both parents are not present, they must include a letter giving permission for the child to cross the border. Since Tyla and I will both be in the car it shouldn’t be a problem.

We’ll probably still go ahead with the passport, but it’s nice to know that we don’t have to worry about it not arriving before we head to Canada.

Temps in the Seattle area are often just a bit too cold for plants to grow well in a garden, so I decided to try a makeshift greenhouse. I picked up some PEX tubing and 0.7mil painters plastic. A couple clothespins later and I had a very rudimentary hoop house. It seemed like it was working really well for the plants that it covered so I decided to try a little experiment. I planted three zucchini plants at the same time and once they had all popped up, I put the hoop house over two of them. The plants circled in blue had the house and the one without is circled in red. What a difference! I think next year I need to expand this greenhouse idea.