Life in Color Photo

What do you think? This new pattern knits up a lot longer than my last one, so next time I won’t go up as high before I decrease, but I like it generally. Sciarrino had a go with it too:

What a goof, being choked by paper samples is probably how she will end up going though! See how much punier my head is?!?!

Happy Mother’s Day moms!  This morning Brent and I drove to Salem to hang out with my mom and grandma. We had a really good brunch at The Wild Pear yum, yum, yum. Of course we had some good conversations, as is our custom 🙂 We talked about a bunch of stuff but one thing that came up was the Oprah show coming up on Monday. I saw the preview, as did my mom and grandma, that said that her and Steadman have a daughter. Well there is barking in the background people and I am sure they are talking about a dog. My grandma “knows” that she really does have a daughter (i.e. tiny human, not tiny canine) so she decided to make a wager on it with me. So if I loose I have to trim my grandma’s grass with scissors (just like she does), and if I win (which I will) I get one of her little Buddha statues (score!!). It was hard to pick just one thing I wanted since my grandma has the coolest stuff ever, but I decided on something little since I pretty much KNOW I am going to win! Anyway we got home, it was starting to rain, and took pictures:

(we’re laughing so hard because Bill just said, “Ya, and I’ll get one all by myself later over here”)

No worries Bill:

After grandma left I took a long swim in the rain! It was so nice. My mom came out and did some movement studies on me while I swam. She took a ton of pictures, so a nice leisurely swim turned into a little bit of a work out, but it’s alright I needed it! Brent and I are here now. I am going to get creative! (results to follow)

I’ll deal with baseball first. Well baseball and Bj’s birthday, yay he’s 23!!!! On Bj’s birthday we drove up to Seattle pretty early (as soon as I dropped Nick off at school). The drive was really rainy and pretty gross. However when we got close to Seattle God smiled down and the sun came out. It was so, so nice. That is until we actually got to the game and started to BOIL!! We dressed for cold, with jeans, tennies, hoodies, multiple t-shirts, etc. with a backpack filled with additional gear including jackets and umbrellas. Well we both ended up sitting in a puddle of sweat with major t-shirt burns and freckles! But it was awesome baseball watching weather. We went to the game about an hour and a half early so we could hang out down by the field. We were so close to the baseball players warming up. Here’s me and Ichiro:

Okay that was actually outside Safeco Field. 🙂 Here is the players really warming up, this is what I saw when I first walked in, wow! (I had never been to Safeco before).

The game was great. We sat behind right field, section 106, row 29, seats 7 and 8. I liked the view of the field from here, and you know, of Ichiro’s butt:

Ichiro is HOT!

But so is Bj! View of Bj from his shortie after the game:

You just can’t tell how pink we are from here!
Okay so then after the game we went back to our hotel: Silver Cloud Hotel (Broadway). I am going to so recommend this hotel people. It’s great if you drive or take the train into town. They have a free shuttle that will take you just about anywhere (we went to and from Safeco, to Pike’s Place, got picked up at Sephora, then dropped off at a used bookstore). Also the picture of the place on their site looks so crappy. The hotel is new and really nice and so clean. I am a freak about hotel comforters after I saw that thing on 20/20 about seaman and everything on them, so I always take those off right away, but this hotel goes an extra step and has sheets on top of and underneath the blanket so you don’t have to touch anything that isn’t cleaned between guests!! I was so pleased to find this out that Bj and I took a nap after the game (we both went to bed late and got up early. Then we went down to the hotel’s bar/restaurant, Cyanne. It was good, we just chilled, Bj got to try a Mojito. After that we were pretty zonked so we headed to bed. We had the best intentions to get up early, but we didn’t. We caught the 12:30 shuttle into town, shopped around for a couple of hours, then realized we didn’t really have money to do that and went back to the hotel. We drove over to Uwajimaya to stoke up on our favorite Japanese foods. The regulations changed a bit and Taro can’t send me over the boatloads of candy I need to survive so I had to find another source. I even got my favorite Ramen snack, yay!!! I found some Fun Chop Chopstick Holders  for my chopstick challanged friends. I also decided that when I have kids I am starting them on chopsticks first! We got some yummy honey moon tea by Bubble Tea. The cups are the coolest:

Isn’t this the best idea, the lid is like vacuum sealed to the top, what a resource saver. These super thin lids don’t leak at all until you puncture them with the straw, they weigh almost nothing, and use a teeny tiny percentage of the plastic. All in all the trip was good. I may have started another addiction. I think I want a Blythe doll!! My Barbies have nothing on this girl. Made famous by this book the doll, which was only made in 1972 has a cult following. People dress her up, do her hair, and take pictures of her everywhere. Here are some great links:
XOXO Blythe (has some good history and shows you the difference between the originals and the Japanese remakes)
This is Blythe (the author’s website, has a forum and everything)
Primmadollies (makes awesome clothes for her dolls, so, so cute)
Changable Blythe (some more history)
Almost Daily Blythe (another fan site)
Live Journal Community of Blythe fans

And I bought myself this book at Uwajimaya:

It shows how to do her hair in a million funky ways. Ohhh I might have to get one!

Okay, this is my scary story about Black Butte. My family used to have a vacation house there that we shared with two other families. Our house was in the Glaze Meadow section of Black Butte. Our place was one of a few on a little cul de sac called Salal. Behind our house was forest service land, a whole bunch of trees and animals and nothing else. When we first got it I was about eight I think. At the very beginning of getting the place all the families came at the same time to do some work on the place (we got it not quite finished). Well after a day of working they decided to go out to dinner at the lodge and left all six of us (me, my little brother (age 6), josh (6), Matt (4), taylor (5) and her little brother (4?) with a baby-sitter. I think though, that the littlest kids were already asleep, it’s a little fuzzy. Anyway, I was the oldest so I was not asleep. After the rest of the kids were I was in the kitchen with her doing dishes or something. We were talking right in front of the kitchen windows that looked out over the forest. After loading dishes in the dishwasher we looked up to…. two guys wearing beanies cupping their hands against the glass to look in. We screamed and the baby-sitter grabbed the phone. Soon the police were there and our parents hurried back from dinner. Okay now, nothing really happened and they didn’t try to get in, but THEY NEVER FOUND THE GUYS!!!  ahhhh. The police think that the guys might have been living in the house before we bought it. When we got it we found things like curdled milk in the fridge and other clues that people had been squatting there. Well it totally freaked me out, and I hate having windows open at night where people can just walk up to them (especially out in the middle of no where). I really don’t like the blinds open at night either. I don’t know if I have all the details right, mom, dad, do I?

Okay so I was looking at my stats for this blog and I had a super high number of hits. PEOPLE IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR THE MENTOS COMMERCIAL, I DON’T HAVE IT YET, SORRY! But I am seriously trying to get it still so check back.

Okay enough of that. So it’s about five hundred degrees in this house. I’ve tried everything to get it cold. None of the kids know how to change it. I’m too freaked out to open the windows on the bottom floor at night (due to an incident at Black Butte when I was eight, if you want details let me know). So if I slip up and have all these type ohs (so don’t know how to phrase/spell that) then know it’s just because of sweaty hands.

Okay also it’s not like we are in just any neighborhood (=added scaryness). See proof when I was stopped by the flagger: lv (leaving) Salem!!! I actually took a lot of pictures today so it will be photo essay day (only I’ll also have lots of words, so I guess not really, sorry Professor Harrison!)

Flipped out a little when I saw the cover on the pool and realized… IT’S HEATED BABY! I love to swim, mom I am going to be over every weekend!

I love my mom’s yard so much that I sent her postcard that looks like this.

Um, I didn’t really want to get to work right away so i was just taking a bunch of pictures. Trying to do a whole body self portrait is hard!

I just thought this was cool. It looks like a lamp hanging from the ceiling, only the “ceiling” is really a pastel painting I did and the lamp is reflected. Enough with those. I got back to work and then headed off the Nick and Lace again. After they got home Nick got the tiger package he was waiting for, (not that Tiger) this tiger:

He is going to wear this when he snowboards in the summer because it’s really light weight. I have to admit, I’ve definitely never scene one like it before, have you? After that excitement he skateboarded until he had to come home to find a band aid and gauze:

But he said it was no big deal (I would have been crying). The rest of the night was mellow. I watched the Amazing Race, phew, next week’s finale is going to be good! Lacey and I knitted some more. She really has the hang of it, I’m so proud of her! She’s a lefty and has never done so much with her right hand before she said. Here’s our progress:

Don’t know how to fix red-eye on this computer sorry. Okay off to Seattle tomorrow, yeah!

Okay I love these kids that I am looking after. After a busy weekend with lots of friends and fun things I said I wanted to do something just us three like we used to do on our days. I didn’t even have to pull anybody’s leg. Nick has been wanting to learn to knit his own beenie like all the cool snowboarders do (and he’s a skater snowboarder himself). So we decided that would be our project. We headed out to the greatest little yarn shop in Salem, Have You Any Wool. Nick got slightly overwhelmed at all the choice ("I just want brown, I don’t get all these other kinds"), and Lacey had to decide between something for herself and her man (she picked the latter, because she’s just so sweet). After all those tough choices we went out to Thai food, yum, yum. As soon as we got home the Nick and Lace wanted to start their lesson right away. It got a little tense when they realized how slowly progress would be. I was pretty amazed how well they both caught on. I made them do a sample to practice and get a gage. Lacey is done and ready to cast on for her hat. Nick is on a second try of his (first one was too loose),  but really happy about it and is bringing it to school to show it off (see knitting is so cool!). They of course did have to get to their homework after a couple hours of knitting. Luckily our Internet was back up and running (I mean man, I can not live with this on and off business). An unfortunate table stapling incident later and they were off to bed. Yup good kids. I’ll have to get pictures of their little projects tomorrow.

Because it sure would be fun to get all dressed up. Lacey and I headed to Portland today to pick out her prom dress. I am staying at Nick and Lacey’s until Wednesday. Nick and Lacey are my all time favorite kids from my Summer Sitting Service I had many years ago. Every Wednesday we would have little adventures, make movies, swim, and play. It was so much fun. Now I come to Salem to stay with them whenever their parents go out of town for a while. They are 13.5 and just fifteen (and Lacey just got her permit, congratulations!) so they don’t really need me that much anymore. But it is still fun to come and take them out and hear what is going on with their lives. Since I’ve graduated high school I’ve probably stayed here ten times or so, a couple times a year. I was here with them when the planes struck the twin towers. It was so weird. That was the moment in my life when I realized I was really a grown up. I was with them when I was just getting to know Bj. He came over to watch a movie while I was staying here and we sat as far away from each other on the couch as we could. These were the first kids I ever watched over night. And that first time at their old house they had a new puppy that I couldn’t get to stop barking at night. It was getting later and later. The kids were in bed I was crying trying to get the puppy to stop and had to call my parents to come help me. But now the kids are grown up and we get to do fun things like shop for prom dresses.

So Lacey and I set out at about 10:30 and left Nick behind (because he is so not interested in prom dresses!). We went to about a zillion shops and didn’t see much besides big poofy princess dresses, which of course was not what Lacey was looking for. Thank goodness because we just popped our heads into a Jessica McClintock and it was absolute craziness in there! After going first to BCBG and putting a few dresses on hold we tried everywhere else. We ended up going back to BCBG and got one of those dresses. A shorter dress that goes from light pink to pink to dark pink to melon from top to bottom. It has little straps and is really cute (sorry can’t find a picture). Then we had to go all over to find silver shoes and jewelry, but it was fun. We took a break to have some great Japanese food at Bush Garden. We headed home around six, rolled in and heated up a frozen pizza. Nick had a good day too and went to see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy with his friends. He said it was “pretty good.”

*On a side note I am totally and utterly addicted to the Internet. When I got here comcast was down and so there was nothing. For over 24 hours no Internet, ahhhh. We got back from Portland and it was restored, phew. Oh, and someone asked in the comments about the ribbon jar… not long now!!!

This is my favorite all time thing to make and eat. I am pretty sure I could live off of it:

2 onions
7 strips bacon
lots of potatoes (I think I used a whole bag yesterday)
1 can creamed corn
1 can not creamed corn
salt
pepper
and I don’t think it is complete with out Johnny’s

Cook bacon in little pieces:

try not to eat all the bacon after you take it out of the pan.

Cut up your onions really teeny tiny:

Then to make it extra yummy you simmer the onions in the bacon fat in a big soup pan with salt and pepper (and Johnny’s). While this is going on peal the potatoes and cut them into chunks. Then after the onions have been going for like five minuets put in the potatoes and just cover with water. I add more salt and pepper usually. I cook this until the potatoes are soft. I like doing it with the lid off because I think the texture is better. Then after the potatoes are cooked drain the non-creamed corn and stick it in, and then stick in the whole creamed corn can. Add in the bacon that you cooked earlier.  Make sure it all gets warm. Serve with grated cheddar cheese and homemade biscuits, yum, yum, yum.