My goodness, it has been a full few days! On Saturday, Brian and I loaded up early and drove up to Seattle to attend the 50th wedding anniversary of Bob and Virginia, our friend Kate's parents. On our way up, we stopped to have lunch and several knock knock jokes with my cousins, and then bought a mini laptop for me (hooray!) so that Brian doesn't have to stop whatever he is doing anytime I want to write a blog, an email or a book. On Sunday, after a delicious breakfast of pumpkin spice waffles with whipped cream (thanks Kate, it was wonderful!!!), off we went to Pike Place market for our weekly grocery shopping and our market fix. Then, a quick three hour drive back to Portland where we were just in time to watch the Trans Siberian Orchestra. By Monday, we were complete zombies and could barely function. A great time was had by all!
The anniversary party was loads of fun. Kate and her sister Gretchen spent months planning and getting ready for this party. See, Bob and Virginia had a very small wedding and no reception 50 years ago. Not this time around! There were about 50 people there and everyone was celebrating the lovely couple. Bob had a short film of their wedding and a dinner afterwards where they were eating cake. Virginia had never seen it since they didn't have any way to view the super 8 film. Gretchen took the film somewhere to have it transferred to DVD and voila!, they had it at the party. They looked so young and in love.
Later, Gretchen showed a slide show of pictures of Bob and Virginia and their family over the years. It was such a nice present to their parents and oh so appreciated. Everyone had a great time. Oh, and the couple never had a wedding cake. So Kate and Gretchen ordered one from Boraccini's bakery in Seattle. It was beautiful and delicious. After the party, we stayed to help clean up so that they could get home a little sooner. Gretchen's husband Mike got the Iron Man award for cleaning all of the dishes and the kitchen while the rest of us took down the decorations and cleaned up the main room. It was so much fun hanging out with Ben, Kate, Lauren, Gretchen, Mike and Jessica that we didn't care what we did with them, so cleanup was fun. Oh, we have missed them while we were off gallivanting around the rest of the country.
On Sunday, I slept in until 7, which is unheard of for me When I got up, I hung out with Ben chatting about Lauren's college choices, dogs and other things. Ben offered us some toys back that we had given them when Lauren was younger. We happily took them to share with my birthday buddy, Finn Dewey, who is three. After a wonderful breakfast, Brian and I spent time at the market... mostly eating and buying food. Oh, and Mike from Sossio's vegetable stand totally remembered us. He was SHOCKED that we had been gone for almost 7 years. He felt like he just saw us a couple of months ago. That was cool. Being regulars somewhere for 15+ years certainly has its advantages, even 7 years later.
We stopped by my cousin Brent's house on the way home to give the toys to Finn. The toys are Rochenboch remote controlled dump trucks with a cool 2 story working structure and lots of balls to scoop up and dump. Finn currently wants to be a garbage man when he grows up, so these toys are perfect. Also, Brent used to play with them with us (long story - just know that Brian and I had disposable income and no kids, so we could buy all of the coolest toys, back in the day). Anyway, Finn was super excited, but Brent had to figure out how to make everything work before he could give it to Finn. The toys are probably more for 8 years and up, but with supervision, they'll be fine.
We got back on the road after a sadly short stop, and worked our way back down to Portland. As we went, we played the alphabet picnic game. You know the one... "I'm going on a picnic and I'm bringing an avocado. I'm going on a picnic and I'm taking an avocado and some bacon." etc. We got down to the letter U, and I said I was bringing Underwear. Brian had the letter V and he said that he was bringing Vitamins because underwear was not a vegetable. That sounded very much like Finn Dewey's knock knock jokes (did I mention he is 3 and his jokes are surreal?) so Brian and I made it into a knock knock joke and cracked ourselves up.
We got to Portland about an hour before the concert, so we stopped and grabbed a quick bite to eat, then went on to the Moda Center. It is a big old place Our seats were pretty high up but right next to the stage. The lights were between us and the stage and we were very concerned about our view of the concert. Luckily, with the first strum of guitar and toss of hair, up came the lights, revealing a perfect view of the stage.
It was a mixed concert. TSO is a hair metal Jesus rock group. I knew about the metal rock, but not about the hair and the Jesus parts. They told a maudlin Christmas story that was used to loosely tie together a bunch of OK songs (a couple of the songs were spectacular, but they were few and far between). All of the songs were accompanied by lots of swinging hair, along the lines of Poison and Night Ranger. In one song, they did a chorus line with hair, one person at a time swinging their hair from left to right, then on the way back, from right to left. I was cracking up. Brian punched me at one point because I was giggling so much. Once the story part was over, it looked like they might be done, but then the started the concert that I was there to see.
If you haven't heard TSO, you are missing something fun. They take classical music and turn it into head banging rock and roll. They did a mash up of Beethoven's 5th and Mozart's Requium. They played Carmina Burana, and then they played Pachabel's Cannon. It was so much fun. There was a crazy light show and lasers, fog and projection work on the castle/sceen on the back of the stage. It was awesome. We really enjoyed ourselves in the second half and the arena was on their feet yelling. Great fun!
So that was our weekend. Monday was a zombie day; we were so tired from the weekend. I went to water aerobics and did some shopping, but until I took a nap and a walk, I was pretty much worthless. I wrote about 3000 words for my book (we're in the last week) and watched Kiss of the Spider Woman, then went to bed. It was a long three days and I slept for 10 hours. Now on to today.
Be happy and healthy!
No comments:
Post a Comment