Sheri is in Seattle for a two-week business trip. Last weekend I flew our for a four-day weekend in Seattle with her. I have a bunch of pictures and I intend to post about it, but I have just been too busy to get around to it.

This is a picture of the first cappuccino I had in Seattle at Espresso Vivace. Notice the neat little design they make on the top of every drink.


The pastry to the right had spinach and feta cheese. It was also very good. As soon as I finished this cappuccino I went back up for an iced Americano and continued to read the paper. When I left I got a hot small triple Americano to go.

I drank so much coffee while I was there. It is so good and it is every where. I intended to bring back at least three pounds of beans, but I only brought back one pound from Espresso Vivace.

I've been having problems getting motivated to get going in the morning, so I just went downstairs, ground 5 tablespoons of coffee, put it in my French press, and brought that upstairs along with my electric kettle and a coffee cup. Tomorrow morning knowing that a perfectly brewed cup of hot coffee is only seven minutes away once my feet hit the floor should be a good motivator.

We hosted our first Gourmet Club dinner at our house last night. The theme was dishes from famous Irish restaurants. We started out with a bowl of carrot soup. We were responsible for the main course which was a stuffed pork loin with homemade gravy and homemade apple sauce. We had one of the women at dinner that is on the Gourmet Club committee and said that my gravy turned out way better then the test batches they made while preparing the menu. The apple sauce was a big hit too.



Current scones and rustic potatoes were served as sides.

Dessert was kind of like a pineapple upside down cake with hazel nuts.









Everything worked out really well. The first couple came over just a few minutes after 7 PM. Everyone left around 10:45 PM.

When we started cleaning up the kitchen drain stopped up really good. I took the trap off under the sink and opened the access port in the basement and could still not get to the clog. I just kept working at it with the plunger. After a half hour of that I thought maybe I should use hot water in order to loosen things up. I also started dumping dishwasher detergent down the drain on the hypothesis the enzymes would start eating away at whatever was stuck down there.

I took a break to go in the basement and make sure the access port was not leaking from me taking it off and screwing it back on. Everything was dry. As I was walking back upstairs the hot water and enzymes finally had the desired effect it whooshed down the pipes. It almost sounded like a toilet was flushed. Yeah!

By this time I am really tired and my back was hurting from cooking, and then hosting, and then plumbing all night. I took a little break on the couch while Sheri continued to clean.

She had to be dialed into work from about 1:30 AM until 5 AM to make sure all of her servers in all of the time zones handled the new Daylight Saving Time date. I was able to stay with her until about 4 AM and then couldn't keep my eyes open. I think she said two of her servers had problems and needed extra attention.

She was able to get about an hour of sleep before she had to get up and get to the airport for her trip. She also got the entire kitchen cleaned up during the breaks she took from work overnight.

I am feeling pretty beat, but I have already showered, had leftover scones, and done a few chores. I don't know what I am going to do next. I have a list, but it is very possible I might just fall asleep on the couch. It is also possible I might get a second wind and go run some errands. Right now I don't know. I think I am running on about 3 or 4 hours of sleep.

Sheri is on the board of our neighborhood homeowners' association. The person that did the newsletter could not do it anymore, so I stepped up and volunteered. There were some camera-ready ads that needed to be scanned either because they were new last month, or the existing scans looked really bad. We decided to go ahead and buy ourselves a scanner. To my surprise almost nobody makes just a flatbed scanner anymore. Everyone is making the all-in-one machines. Fax-copy-scan-printer. One place we went had two flatbed scanners, but they were clearance and they only had the floor models left.

We walked over to the all-in-one section and started looking at those. We ended up with an HP C3180. After the rebate it will only be $65, so that wasn't so bad. I did not even install the ink cartridges that came with it because I like our current printer and I am just going to use it as a scanner.

I have had some fun scanning some old pictures around the house, and will probably continue to do that as I come across them.

In this 1942 picture my mother is the baby in lap of her grandmother. The writing on the back of the picture says (I left off all the last names):

Left to Right (Standing) Mary, Glen, Katherine mother – (Martha), Jacob, Michael (Grandma B's brother)
Sitting: Great Grandma and Grandpa Nick and Fannie, Beverly

click for larger picture


If anyone is interested in a larger picture for getting prints let me know. The original scan is very high resolution; 5,058 x 3,850 pixels.

The bean soup I made last week turned out really good and we ate every last drop. I had celery and carrots on hand because of the soup so I thought that was a good enough excuse to make a pot of chicken noodle soup this weekend.

I got a six pound chicken for only $4, and a bunch of parsley at the grocery store and came home yesterday and got that cooking. After a couple hours of that cooking on the stove I stained out all of the chicken, vegetables, parsley, bay leaves, etc. put the pot on the patio to quickly chill, and then brought it inside before we went to bed.

This morning I scraped the fat layer off of the top and put the pot back on the heat. I finely diced up a couple carrots, a stalk of celery and a medium onion and have that cooking right now. The broth tastes amazingly rich.

We are going to get cleaned up and dressed, boil the noodles, have a bowl of soup, and then run some Sunday afternoon errands.