Bow Baby Shower

This project is still cooking.

Here's a photo of me at 33.5 weeks. This was taken last weekend at my Mom's house during a baby shower (for the kid lovingly nicknamed "Buck" by his aunties).


Mom and Susanna put together a great shower, and we were lavished with all sorts of amazing gifts, attention, hugs and well-wishes. Soon I will post some of the great  gifts that we received; many of which were handmade, which I am extremely grateful for since I don't seem to have much creativity mojo in me to make anything for my son.

Here are a few shots of the party:

Peter Rabbit

"Bunny Tails" Cake Pops

Flowers from Mom's garden

Susanna

Freshly caught and smoked salmon, courtesy of Mark, along with pretzel rolls, manchego & fig, and cucumber tea sandwiches

Empanadas! Mom and I spent the morning making these in assembly-line fashion.

Mike shows off his best "soothing sway"

Denver

March was not a great project month for me. The highlight of the month was a trip to Denver for a work conference. The conference took place over three days, and was pretty jam-packed, but my colleague and I flew out a day early to try and see a few sights. We managed to just miss a major storm, and arrived to 14" of fresh snow and sunny blue skies.

After checking into the The Curtis hotel, we trekked down to the civic/cultural district.

Denver Art Museum

 
The Denver Art Museum was far too large for us to explore thoroughly, but from what I did see, my favorite exhibit was "Fox Games".

Denver Art Museum

 

 
We also made it to the Clyfford Still Museum, which was fabulous throughout. It's very easy to make it through the whole museum in a couple of hours (just about my limit on museum tours).

Clyfford Still Museum

Clyfford Still Museum

 There is no shortage of large exterior sculptures in Denver.

Outside the Denver Public Library

"I See What You Mean"

Denver Convention Center

Downtown Denver

 

The old Tivoli Brewery, now a Student Union on the Auraria Campus

Cheers for a Perfect Day

 
Last Friday we had another one of those perfect ski days. We headed back to Timberline on Mount Hood, and were welcomed with blue skies, fresh snow and very, very few people. I love days like this and it makes the $60 lift ticket worth it. It even snowed very lightly in the afternoon, which made Mike happy.

Papa, you would have enjoyed skiing on this type of day!
 

There was one slight mishap when Mike's snowboard bindings released his board just after we got on the lift and I threatened to make him ride the lift back down to retrieve it. Luckily the lift operators sent it up with a skier and he was saved the embarrassment.

It bears pointing out that the ski lift operators seemed to be in an incredible mood on Friday - all smiles, well wishes and helpfulness. Maybe that's normal...

We called it quits around 4 pm so that we could grab a seat at the Rams Head Bar in the 

Timberline Lodge for some mugs of cocoa.

The lodge is awesome; built in the 30's as a WPA project, and declared a historic landmark in the 70's. For anybody interested in this sort of thing, here is the interactive timeline.

The level of craftmanship and attention to detail is incredible.
I love sitting up on this floor and looking down at the fireplace and cozy couches. And the views out the windows are great on a clear day, provided that snow hasn't reached the second floor and blocked them out!








Finally, no trip east of Portland would be complete without grabbing food and drinks at Everybody's Brewing in White Salmon. So that's just what we did. Cheers for a perfect day.

Sallie Ford, Finally!

Earlier this month Mike and I went to Eugene for the weekend to catch a duck's basketball game. The team has been iffy this season, but they managed to eek out a win at the last minute. We left with about a minute left on the clock and high-tailed it over to the Lane County Fairgrounds to finally catch Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside, playing at the Eugene Microbrew Festival.

  

We've been trying to catch the Portland band for the last year, but they seem to rarely play in Portland. We almost saw them in Seattle last spring, but were overcome with exhaustion at the thought of a start time of 11 pm. Sara and Bobby even saw them in Ohio before us! They must cater to the young, hipster crowd, because there is no way that I'm staying up to catch a concert that starts that late. This time she was scheduled at 8:30 pm - much more my style.

We had to pay to get into the beer festival to see her, which was not a bad deal ($21), but their organization of getting people into the festival was horrid! They've been doing this for 14 years or so, and they had only one computer for credit card purchases and the ATM was broken. We waited in line for 30 minutes, and there were only a dozen people in front of us. I was pretty irritated by the time we got inside (patience is not my virtue), but at least there was beer when we arrived.

We had a little time before Sallie took the stage to sample some excellent beers:
Georgetown's Lucille IPA
Firestone Walker's Union Jack IPA 
Crazy Mountain Amber Ale

My favorite was the Union Jack and Mike preferred the Lucille.












The concert was great, but the best part was watching the UO students get drunk and dance. It was fabulous entertainment, and wonderful reassurance that being in one's thirties isn't so bad after all.

Thankful for it all

I love this time of year - the food, family and festivities make the freezing rain seem bearable.

Mike and I spent the thanksgiving holiday at Papa's house - 4 lovely days of food, sitting by the fire, antiquing, watching football and working on projects. Between us all we had a myriad of projects going on:

Papa, Mike and Aidan brewed a batch of IPA (some details on the process here)

Papa and I made cinnamon rolls from the Grand Central Baking Book
(thanks Remi & Andrew!).

They were delicious, and time consuming.

Pa and Sharon have been hard at work on getting a railing up around their loft area. With a little help from Mike and Aidan they managed to get the vertical support beam in place...

... and several of the horizontal rails bolted in place. You can see the ladder that Pa recently made to the loft at the right of the photo. Aidan and I spent some time reading his new book up there. It's nice and cozy.

Papa, Susanna & I also bottled and corked 184 bottles of red wine!

In addition:

• We stained some kitchen stools, decided they were ugly, and sanded the stain off.
• Worked on a sewing project (to be revealed after it's gifted).
• Crocheted a baby sweater.
• And made a ton of Thanksgiving food! 

As you may have noticed from all the above involvement of my father, my need to have lots of projects going on at one time is genetic. In the Fall issue of West Sound Home & Garden magazine, Pa and Sharon's house & a sampling of all their projects were the focus of an article, complete with a ton of photos. For any interested family and friends who haven't seen it, below are images of the magazine pages. Click on each one and it will enlarge for reading.

Yippee-Ki-Yo, Austin!

Shortly after returning from Ohio, as in three days after, I took off to Austin, TX for a work conference. I arrived in Austin to 80 degree weather, sun and blue skies. After dumping my stuff at a dump of a hotel, I headed out for a five-mile walk around town.

The best part of the photo above is the guy on the stand-up paddle board. He was just casually paddling along in the sun. The river was calm and quiet and there was no boat traffic. I was oh so jealous.


I took a break along the walk to grab dinner at the Easy Tiger, a suggestion of my friend Jessica, who has recently relocated to Austin. It was perfect. After walking past countless big, dark bars on 6th street, entering the Easy Tiger was like being back in Portland.






I highly enjoyed my beer and pretzel on the patio,
and I recommend the addition of the cheese.

Back across the river on South Congress there was no shortage of art, shops, food & drink. My favorite parts were the signs and murals.

 

For anybody heading to Austin...

 

I caught dinner one night at the Enoteca Vespaio (excellent Nicoise Salad) and breakfast at Magnolia Cafe (crazy busy on a Friday morning but decent food). At the conference I was also able to sample Hey Cupcake! (red velvet) and an IPA from Independence Brewing. Just before I headed back to the airport I stopped in at Stitch, a fabric store on South First Street. I had read about it on Dana's blog and it was only a few blocks from my hotel. It's a cute shop, but definitely geared to the crafter-sewist. They offer a lot of pre-cut fabric swatches for bags and such, but they don't carry much in the way of apparel fabric. They had a great selection of felt though, and their class list looks fun. Lastly, I was able to take the Airport Express bus from the airport to my hotel/downtown, and back again, and it only cost a $1 each way! Forget the rental car if you're sticking close to downtown.