11 posts tagged “vancouver wa”

... On the ceiling! At Vancouver Pizza, where they have lovely wheat crusts as an option!

Usually my food gets its pic taken here, but today i was looking at the pretty wall. We love this place and feel so bad that the last 3 visits we've been the only customers.

I woke up the first day of the year, really wanting to write a recap of my year.  I skimmed back through the first months of last year because I thought I would have done something in a small way then, and I didn't.  So next year, I'll have this to look back on and see where I've grown.  Anyhow, I fought with myself on how to present it.  I fought with myself to sit down and actual type over the course of a few days it so that I had this remembrance to look back on.  And then I fought with myself on how to end it because there's so much to it, and so much more in my life I could be introspective about...

The biggest things that I am proud and/or excited about of this year are my reading, cooking, listening (music/podcasts), knitting, gaming, and watching.  So much that I wrote whole posts on them.  Some of the other things that I did this year were also very fun or important to me, but they weren't worth a whole post!

I blogged this year.  

This was done mostly here on Vox.  Sometimes, my blogging just took the form of updating my media lists for books and movies, because I just didn't have the time or energy to write real posts.  I also added some delicious links to my main blog (automatically), got a facebook account to track friends there, and did private posts on my livejournal.  

I also moblogged this year, continuing to carry my camera phone with me everywhere and taking random pictures to remind me of things we did.  Even though a lot of these turn into self-portraits, I don't mind.

I took pictures with both my phone for easy moblogging and my camera.  My camera photos are mostly of family events or special things, and many of these are not in Vox yet, just iPhoto.  But there are a lot of knitting photos in that pile, as well.  Those, I used the FlickrExport to send to my Flickr account (which I've by now caught up with the limitations of a free account) so I could use them both on Ravelry and pull them into Vox as needed.

I dealt with my health this year. 

I made conscious decisions to do things to reduce my stress level and help my CFIDS/Fibromyalgia.  Even though this was one of the worst years in the last 5 years for my health, I feel slightly better at the end of the year.  I also made a set of visits to the dentist to have fillings done, even though it's still very scary to me.

I traveled this year.

We started out the year in California on our trip last Christmas and so we had a long drive for that trip.  Then in June, I went to San Francisco for work.  Also in June, we visited the beach with the whole Locatis family.  In July, we flew down to California for a friend's birthday and had a wonderful time with friends and family.

We also did exploring local places.  We spent a bit more time learning what was here in Vancouver that we hadn't seen, and went to the Farmers Market many times over the course of the late spring-early autumn, which is also a nice chance to walk around Esther Short Park.  We visited new restaurants in the area, which is very adverturesome of me because I  usually stick with the same things I know.  And we went to the fancy theater, Cinetopia, several times as well.  Some of this, I got a chance to Yelp about, and other things I just read reviews before visiting to see what other people thought.

We went down to our favorite outdoor mall, Bridgeport Plaza several times, and once down to the Woodburn Outlet mall.  At least one time to Washington Square in Beaverton, as well.  We enjoy window shopping the most out of going to these places, and usually my reasoning for going has to do with the food that's nearby.

We even ventured into Portland more than we have in the past!  We visited the Pearl district a number of times to go to PF Changs and surrounding area including Powells, and made it to the Saturday Market further down from there.  We made it to an outdoor art show at one point, too.  And multiple trips to Pioneer Place were nice for going to the closest Apple store and more.

I spent time with family this year.  

We participated and helped with Megan's wedding in February, and that was a big wonderful event.  Our trip to the beach with everyone on the Locatis family side was a good chance for us to relax together.  We spend many weekends getting together through the year, with dad or one of us (usually dad) cooking for the whole group.  We visited with E's family after the new year, during several trips when they came up to visit at the beginning of the year, and then when we went down in July.  One of the fun things this year has been to watch Leah and baby Leonard (my niece and nephew) grow, and do fun things for them.  We've also had a lot of fun playing games together throughout the year with both sides of the family.

I met up with friends this year.

I have a really hard time reconnecting with people from my past.  This year, I took time to meet up with a friend from college, and even more amazingly, a friend from high school.  Even though I was super nervous, both meetings went so much better than my nightmares lead me to believe they would.  It makes me think I'm not as awful with people as I think, and maybe I'm starting to heal from past situations a little too.

But mostly, I've just learned how to be Kristine.  That's always a challenge, to be myself.  And this year, I grew more comfortable in that, even though it was another year where I had to say that I was in the 30-40 age range on questionaires.  I embrace my ISTJ-ness and do things consistent rather than trying to be something I'm not.

Thanks for bearing with me through this series of posts, even as the days of the month moved faster than my typing.  

We went to the christmas Festival of Trees in Vancouver at the Hilton last weekend.  It was a beautiful display!

The new building for the newspaper is almost done now and looking super nice.

On a walk around Esther Short Park, there were beautiful leaves to step on.

We went to a new ice cream parlor on Friday night after dinner, Ice Cream Renaissance (on yelp).  We'd seen this when we visited the uptown village section of Vancouver a few weeks back and knew we'd have to visit.

They actually had waters that took your order and so it was a fancy way to have ice cream, but still not too expensive.  We tried the Officer's Row, a small sampler dish of 5 scoops.  Honey Vanilla, Cream de Minted, Pumpkin Pie, Peanut Butter, and Cookie Dough Vinci.  3 of those were specialty flavors that they don't always offer.  My favorite was the special Pumpkin Pie, but the Honey Vanilla was also very good. 

Next time, I think we'll have to get a fancy sundae, there are a ton of options (including one called Mt. St. Helens, with raspberry lava on top!).  We have to take E's family here next time they visit!

The restaurant itself is done up with cool decorations, like info about Donatello all over our table (under glass).  If I wasn't enjoying my ice cream so much, I probably would have learned more except for the conversation with E about my confusion over which renaissance people were Turtles ;)

Above our seat in the alcove of the front of the restaurant was a cloudy sky, which I love, and a big star.

I had a very nice weekend.

It started out with E having a half-day on friday, giving him a chance to work on a web project for much of the afternoon while I did menu planning and knitting and tv watching.  He's got a small contract with a friend to do updates to an existing site, and it seems like it's a fun challenge for him.

Saturday, I had good plans, and they all worked out, and that's always nice.  When I was at the library on Wednesda for the knit in, there were some projects in the work for knitting donations to benefit the library.  They mentioned needing someone to put together baskets for this auction, and I said I was good at making things look pretty (yes, I'm crafty!) and they were excited for that and suggested I should just join the Friends group to make it official that I was helping out. 

Side note: The Friends of the Library are a group of people who help in fundraising for the library and assist in book sales and do other activities to promote the library.  I always figured that when I got older, I'd be most excited about helping the library if there ever was a chance.  I mean, hello, it comes full circle because I was the youngest volunteer in the system when I helped in Washougal (from ages 12-15).  :)

So the first monthly meeting was going to be on Saturday morning, so I planned on that.  It was a nice meeting, even though 2 of the 4 people I knew in the group weren't there.  I got to take home all the current basket auction stuff they had so far, and it was really nice to meet all the other people who were involved in the Friends group.  I was the youngest there this time, but I didn't feel out of place, people made me feel comfortable right away.

After that, I was excited about going to the Farmer's Market again - the last time we went, we didn't see many fruits or vegetables we really had to have, and this time, I planned it so we'd go here before the grocery store, and that was much smarter.  We walked all the way through and then decided what to get.  A beautifully shaped butternut squash, a couple ears of corn to eat that day, fresh from the garden red peppers, a nectarine, and some apples.  There were so many other things we could get, but it's definitely a case where we didn't want to get them and have them go bad, with just two of us to eat produce.  It was very successful!

Then we drove up Main street, where E thought he'd seen some restaurants.  We went to an area of the city I don't think I've ever been to, they call it Uptown Village.  There were a lot of interesting shops and a Subway, so we parked and figured if we didn't see anything else, we could always go there.  We ended up finding La Bottega, which was a wine store with a deli/cafe in it.  The garlic smell was really good, with a small but interesting menu, so we decided to try it out.  That's where the Strawberry Coke was from. :)  We had fun looking in the windows of other shops, too.

While at the restaurant, we finished our grocery list and went off to Safeway to finish off the plans for the day.  We went home and rested and relaxed and cooked dinner and watched TV and it was a nice finish to a day full of great things.

On Sunday, we went to a double birthday party for my sister Megan and her husband Andrew.  Their birthdays are 2 days apart, so we are destined to always have joint parties!  It was a delicious birthday dinner my dad cooked, steaks and barbeque chicken and my favorite pasta salad and veges in cheese sauce, and of course, a cheese cake for desert (this is the sister who had cheesecake for her wedding!)  We played with Leah and Leonard and sat and chatted, and it was a nice afternoon.

Today, I'm a little sore still from all the activities, but it was a great weekend, so I can't complain!

The last two weekends, we've been out and about...

Weekend before last, we decided to go down to Portland's Saturday Market because we'd never been before.  We enjoy the farmer's market in Vancouver a lot, and figured this would be a bigger and more interesting one.  We figured out where it was and were amazed at the crowds of people.  It actually is considerably different than Vancouver's - the V one is heavily based on fresh fruits and vegetables, with some homemade things (crafts/woodwork/gifts/homemade foods) and a food court of sorts.  P's is very based on booths of stuff, a lot of homemade things and things that seemed a little overpriced in places.  No fruits and veges at all.  There were a lot of ethnic booths, and clothes, and quite a lot of jewelry. The booths went on and on, we thought we'd made it through them, and then there was another section, and across the street, and another one, and everywhere!  Pretty phenomenal.  With that many people gathered around, it *was* hard to see though. 

We were so close to Pioneer Place that we headed over to the mall to see what movies were playing.  At least 2 things were out I wanted to see: Transformers and Die Hard.  Die Hard wasn't playing, but we were within 20 mins of Transformers (which is not on amazon yet to put in this post as a movie, sigh) at a matinee time, so that was perfect. Even though I knew nothing barely about them from my childhood, it was a super movie.  We were really surprised that the theater was pack a couple weeks after opening).

We started to walk through the mall, but nothing was super enticing to look at, so we headed over to Macaroni Grill.  We had a delicious meal, wow my dinner was so good I can still taste it, so that was perfect.

On Sunday, we went and hung out with my siblings at Lisa and Jon's house.  We had a nice time, and got to sit and play a great game of Bohnanza with Jon, I've never had that much fun with that game before!  3 players really is fun.

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Then this weekend that just happened, we didn't know what was going on with the family and mom wasn't home, so we did our own thing.  Some books were due back at the library, and I'd been wanting to look at general craft books rather than just looking things up online, so we went to the BIG library.  Then I wanted to get some fresh fruits and veggies at the farmer's market (Vancouver), so we went to see what was there.  There were a TON of people because of the Hawaiian festival in the park.  And not really any good fruits/veges that I wanted to pick up, so we just walked around for a bit and then left.  Because we were downtown, we headed to Thai Orchid for lunch, I love the lemongrass chicken with peanut sauce.  During dinner, we started talking about upcoming birthdays, and then drove around looking for a gift afterwards.  Oh, and stopped at Z Games, where they had some nice new games (couple of Rio Grande, the publishers of many of the ones we own) we hadn't heard of (it's fun to look, we didn't buy anything).  When we got home, we played some board games  (I won both, I think!) and then watched the next Netflix disk (I need to update my movie sidebar with those).

Yesterday, we were going to just stay in, but decided to continue looking for a gift idea (no luck, but at least we know where it *isn't* :P) and that took us down to Clackamas to eat at Claim Jumpers.  I varied from my norm (Tillamook Cheeseburger is divine) and got a Citrus Chicken Salad, and it was okay, but not something worth driving down there for.  We did the mall walk, and didn't find what we were looking for, but it's good exercise (over a mile) and it's really fun to see the progress on the remodel they are doing.

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Overall, we've really had some great together time lately, and these kind of activities get us talking and exercising instead of staying in all the time.  My legs continue to be sore, so we went slow everywhere.  I keep telling myself that the more walking I do, the better they will be, but it doesn't work that way every time!  So we walk slow and I take chances to stretch my ankles when we stop for a minute and sit down  when there's a seat. :)  I really love my husband, it's great to have someone who doesn't mind just doing this kind of stuff together.

Watch out, the weather is a little frightening.  It's already 70 at 8:20am, and currently headed for a hundred.