4 posts tagged “weekend wrap-up”

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!

This weekend was full of a variety of stuff. 

I started it off by getting ready for a garage sale, gathering and pricing things in our house that hadn't been touched for so long that they needed to go to a better home.  Sarah had a friend who needed to sell some stuff, so we all joined it together and had it at her house.  I really didn't think we'd find as much as we did to contribute.

On Saturday morning, we loaded up the garage sale stuff and planned to spend the day at Sarah's.  E and me did a lot of handling customers and generally enjoyed playing with the kids in between times.  We ended up making a little over $20 on our junk!  I found a few frames that I wanted to redo with art or painting or something and a cherry necklace that I decided was calling my name.  Nobody snatched up any of my handmade stuff I brought along (3 dishclothes and a set of 3 handpainted cards), or any of the makeup pile, but I was happy I had them there anyhow just in case. 

Sunday was a lot of resting.  Being in the sun and dealing with walking back and forth a lot on Saturday caught up with me, and so I hobbled around a bit.  It was okay though, because we got to watch some TV and E started a new game (Final Fantasy VII, Dirge of Cerberus) that I wanted to hear the story on, and we played some board games.  Oh and we cooked together which is a nice activity.  Very restful.

And then today, we knew we wanted to leave the house, but just didn't really have any great ideas on what we wanted to do.  We pulled out the atlas even to see where we could drive to.  Finally, we started thinking about going downtown Portland to see Powells and from there, we learned of an annual art festival, Art in the Pearl.  That sounded like an interesting idea, so we did head down there and went to the festival and saw such a wide variety of art in different mediums that it was really a cool thing.  We also hit Sur La Table, which I love, and PF Changs, and had some yummy gelato (Watermelon and Grapefruit, it was really good).  It was a delightful time out, and really made for a nice day off.

One of the things that I noticed over the weekend is how I was feeling a little lethargic about my computer last week, and I hope that I can get back into the happy posty feeling this coming week. :)

This weekend, we did a lot of stuff.  This was good, and we had a super time.  I'm taking it a little easier than some mondays to get back my energy!

Saturday, we celebrated my sister Lisa's 22nd birthday at my parents house.  We had delicious sandwiches and cake and ice cream, and it was the first time in a while that we actually went to my parents house, we've been visiting all the other family houses more lately.  It was a nice party and we had fun together even though some of the family wasn't around.  Last year at this time, we were getting ready for Lisa's wedding, so it sure has been an eventful year!

Afterwards, Lisa and Jon wanted to go to IKEA, and I'd been wanting to go a lot too, so we decided to do that together.  Portland's IKEA is brand new, it opened the middle of last week, and the parking lots are still really full!  It was super fun to see everything, what an awesome store.  Definitely my kind of place.  I'd like a big pile of money to redo some rooms in my house (or better yet, an even bigger pie of money to get the next better house and then set that up perfectly! :D)  We came away without buying anything, but I'll definitely go back and dream s'more (maybe during the day instead of a weekend evening with so many people!!)  We finished out the evening with some games, I've been really excited over Ticket to Ride with E lately, and that seems to be my first pick when we decide what to play; even when I don't win ;). 

On Sunday, we got up and went to church with Leonard and Sarah and family.  They just started attending a new church, and it was nice.  We heard the head pastor speak and it was a good sermon with some Bible stories I hadn't heard the background too, and really interesting tips for being bold.  One of my favorite parts of going to church is usually the music, and they didn't disappoint.  They were having a cowboy theme and led into the service with Steven Curtis Chapman's Saddle up your Horses; an oldie of his, but I can't help but like even his old stuff.  (Ahh, he's got a new album coming out this week!  It's been a long time.  Check out the single on his site.  And dude, he has a TypePad blog! :) )

After church, there was a big giant summer festival going on for church members and friends, so we went over there.  They had entertainment, food,  a TON of blow-up bouncy things, and even ponies and camels!  We played with the kids and E ran around going with Leah to the blow-up things (her favorite was one that was Noah's Ark, it was a nice size.  Baby Leonard tried several times to try and grab other people's food (mine included), but one was hilarious because he just jetted (he crawls fast) to another person's blanket and Leonard grabbed him JUST as his hand was almost in their food!

We came home and I was tired so we sat and watched part of our next Netflix tv show, and then played another game (Thurn and Taxis this time) and I made some nice long routes and won.  Oh, and then we watched Feasting on Asphalt, we are so glad they decided to make another season.  It's such a cool concept and beautiful camera work and photography.  I'm hoping that one of these seasons, he'll make it up the Northwest, since he did the South, and now Mississippi river.

At the end of the day,I went to brush my teeth and noticed that the top of my forehead was a little red.  Oops, I guess I did get some sun.  And then I looked down, and ohhhh no, my arms are red too!  I'll have a bit of a farmers tan for wearing a t-shirt yesterday.  But for now, they are pretty red.  I'm usually the queen of sunscreen.  My face had some because of my day solution (Mary Kay, I think it's spf 15), but I'm a dork and didn't bring my sunscreen or bother to use Sarah's.  I guess it wasn't that HOT out, and the sun wasn't shinning directly, so it didn't seem as obvious to remember.  Ooops.

It certainly was a weekend of fun, and the memories will last much longer than the sunburn arms and sore legs :)  It's so nice to have family members to hang out with for a variety of things!

I finally got around to adding a few of my recent photos off my camera.  For some reason, my camera sat here for several weeks w/o being touched, and I finally got a chance to move them to my computer, title them in iPhoto, export them to flickr (to keep my titles, descriptions, and resize them) and then pull them into Vox.  Phew!

july 4th, 2006

vancouver frog

I have some 4th of july ones together in a collection, as well as just some random ones from last weekend's trip to Vancouver.  We just decided to go wandering around, and ended up looking through some shops: a used book store where E found a ton of things to get and I got one children's book I remember laughing hysterically at, several Art Galleries with local art, wandering down the street and back up over again to the car, and finally stopping at a cafe for lunch and gelato.  We headed for a cool kid's toystore next door for a bit, looking at games and always skimming for potential gifts for miss leah.  Our goal was to go to Farmers market, but by the time we walked that direction, it was closed.  Oops, we'll try for that another day.

It was a delightful day, even though my legs were sore after walking so much.  I definitely want to go and do that again, and maybe even sit in the park downtown.  There was a big thing going on when we walked back that way, too, and I'm not sure we would have fit in at the pride event :)  But we did sit and listen to the music for a few minutes and it was nice.

So yeah, back to my title of the post... I added other stuff to vox too.  I've been trying to keep up on all of my movies and books too.  With our now-regular trips to the library and the Netflix movies coming in a few times a week, it's quite exciting to be able to track them here. :)  No new music, but I do have a gift card on my desk and hope to get some new stuff soon. Cori gave me some great ideas of Ani DiFranco songs I should check out, at the very least!

This weekend was much lighter - we spent quite a bit of the weekend resting and I took several naps.  We ended up going to Leonard and Sarah's and having dinner with them and Mom and Dad (steak on the grill, corn on the cob, bread, and salad, AND blackberry/blueberry cobbler, SO goood).  We hung out with Leah and I read books with her and we played in her little pool (just a kiddy pool with 6-9" of water).  Then today, we played a bit, watched a movie, and ate leftovers.  A few interesting work things in between, but mainly tried to rest and relax and get ready for another week. :)