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fenchurchAKA a fun weekend in Portland and Seattle!
(Okay, so we never actually went into Seattle, but I thought it would lose some of its punch to say "fun weekend in Portland, Bellevue and Kirkland!")
The trip to Portland was the highlight, though, since it meant a wedding and a visit to Powell's. The wedding reception was lovely --![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mekle's sister and her new husband were practically floating... they were very, very cute together. Definitely worth the three and a half hour drive down!
They'd come up with a rather clever idea to spruce up the "cultural hall" (aka the gym) at the church for the reception. It's actually not a horrible space to use for this sort of thing, since it's also got a stage and adjustable lighting and a sound system, but no matter how much crepe paper you put up or what fancy names you come up with for it, it's still just a gym. Anyway, they'd ordered LED flashing magnetic pins shaped like stars from Oriental Trading Company, had blown up a whole bunch of balloons with helium, attached the flashy stars to the ends of their strings and let them float to the ceiling. The result, when the lights were turned down, was a really nifty starry sky! Neat!
Powell's was just as cool as ever... seriously, if you've never been, you have to go just so you can stand in the entrance and inhale. It's a wonderful smell.
We met up withcorellian_sugar at the coffee shop there and I got to indulge my recent addiction to rooibos tea (it's all dm_lunsford's fault! She very kindly brought some with her to the seminar on tea at JadeCon so I'd have something non-caffeinated to try -- I've been hooked ever since!). There was much talk about Zoë, since Corellian_Sugar is the one who gave us our wonderful new cat in the first place, and about all the various and sundry things SF geeks talk about when they meet up at the world's best bookstore.
In the end, I managed to resist picking up anything new out of the Math or Physics sections by remembering how many books I already have on my Teetering Pile in those subjects, but we did increase our Aaron Allston collection by two Terminator novels. Yay!
And then, it was another three-plus hour drive back in the Puget Sound for a bit of Penny Arcade Expo 2006. I think it would have been a bit more fun if we'd been able to get into any of the seminars or panels... but wow, was it PACKED. I really think they've outgrown the Meydenbauer Center by quite a bit. Oh, and if you think GenCon smells bad... imagine GenCon on the last day, and then cram everyone like sardines into a space about half the size needed, and add in huge beanbags and throwpillow thingies lining the hallways with people crashed out on them. Um, yeah.
Oh, and they weren't selling any cool PAXfest t-shirts. Big disappointment there. Isn't that one of the reasons you go to conventions? To increase your t-shirt collection? Or maybe that's just me...
I wandered the show floor for a bit and ended up spending most of my time chatting with Frelorn (one of the guys from Turbine) and a few other AC players over at the Asheron's Call display. Eventually, we headed over to El Azteca for the Asheron's Call Players Group Dinner... which was a lot of fun, even though I think there was only one other person at the dinner who plays on Leafcull (other than Mekle, Rackham and me).
And, finally, Zoë got a bit of a surprise today... one I'm hoping won't make her sick. While we were gone over the weekend, we'd put out the "buffet" (normally, we feed the cats metered amounts of canned food twice a day... but the vet said it was okay to leave out the feeders with dry food if we were going to gone for a little while -- his precise words were "hey, you're going to be partying, why shouldn't they?"). Today, the cats were put back on their canned food diet and, I suspect, are still fairly full from being able to gorge themselves to their hearts' content for a few days.
I'd fed the cats their dinner and Zoë had nibbled briefly on hers, then wandered away... and a bit later I was in the kitchen when I heard her near my feet crunching on something. Considering Rackham had recently vacuumed the floor, there weren't a whole lot of things it could be... and it hit me right around the time it hit her. Earlier in the evening I'd refilled our pepper grinder and a few peppercorns had skittered away... I thought I'd gotten them all, but apparently not! Admittedly, some of the larger ones look quite a bit like kibble, but I have no idea how she managed to eat a whole one before realizing it wasn't actually catfood! The poor cat was sort of twitching all over and licking around her mouth like she was trying to get rid of the taste. Hopefully this won't give her indigestion or something worse. And maybe she'll be just a tad more careful about eating random bits of food in the future!
(Okay, so we never actually went into Seattle, but I thought it would lose some of its punch to say "fun weekend in Portland, Bellevue and Kirkland!")
The trip to Portland was the highlight, though, since it meant a wedding and a visit to Powell's. The wedding reception was lovely --
mekle's sister and her new husband were practically floating... they were very, very cute together. Definitely worth the three and a half hour drive down!They'd come up with a rather clever idea to spruce up the "cultural hall" (aka the gym) at the church for the reception. It's actually not a horrible space to use for this sort of thing, since it's also got a stage and adjustable lighting and a sound system, but no matter how much crepe paper you put up or what fancy names you come up with for it, it's still just a gym. Anyway, they'd ordered LED flashing magnetic pins shaped like stars from Oriental Trading Company, had blown up a whole bunch of balloons with helium, attached the flashy stars to the ends of their strings and let them float to the ceiling. The result, when the lights were turned down, was a really nifty starry sky! Neat!
Powell's was just as cool as ever... seriously, if you've never been, you have to go just so you can stand in the entrance and inhale. It's a wonderful smell.
We met up with
corellian_sugar at the coffee shop there and I got to indulge my recent addiction to rooibos tea (it's all dm_lunsford's fault! She very kindly brought some with her to the seminar on tea at JadeCon so I'd have something non-caffeinated to try -- I've been hooked ever since!). There was much talk about Zoë, since Corellian_Sugar is the one who gave us our wonderful new cat in the first place, and about all the various and sundry things SF geeks talk about when they meet up at the world's best bookstore.In the end, I managed to resist picking up anything new out of the Math or Physics sections by remembering how many books I already have on my Teetering Pile in those subjects, but we did increase our Aaron Allston collection by two Terminator novels. Yay!
And then, it was another three-plus hour drive back in the Puget Sound for a bit of Penny Arcade Expo 2006. I think it would have been a bit more fun if we'd been able to get into any of the seminars or panels... but wow, was it PACKED. I really think they've outgrown the Meydenbauer Center by quite a bit. Oh, and if you think GenCon smells bad... imagine GenCon on the last day, and then cram everyone like sardines into a space about half the size needed, and add in huge beanbags and throwpillow thingies lining the hallways with people crashed out on them. Um, yeah.
Oh, and they weren't selling any cool PAXfest t-shirts. Big disappointment there. Isn't that one of the reasons you go to conventions? To increase your t-shirt collection? Or maybe that's just me...
I wandered the show floor for a bit and ended up spending most of my time chatting with Frelorn (one of the guys from Turbine) and a few other AC players over at the Asheron's Call display. Eventually, we headed over to El Azteca for the Asheron's Call Players Group Dinner... which was a lot of fun, even though I think there was only one other person at the dinner who plays on Leafcull (other than Mekle, Rackham and me).
And, finally, Zoë got a bit of a surprise today... one I'm hoping won't make her sick. While we were gone over the weekend, we'd put out the "buffet" (normally, we feed the cats metered amounts of canned food twice a day... but the vet said it was okay to leave out the feeders with dry food if we were going to gone for a little while -- his precise words were "hey, you're going to be partying, why shouldn't they?"). Today, the cats were put back on their canned food diet and, I suspect, are still fairly full from being able to gorge themselves to their hearts' content for a few days.
I'd fed the cats their dinner and Zoë had nibbled briefly on hers, then wandered away... and a bit later I was in the kitchen when I heard her near my feet crunching on something. Considering Rackham had recently vacuumed the floor, there weren't a whole lot of things it could be... and it hit me right around the time it hit her. Earlier in the evening I'd refilled our pepper grinder and a few peppercorns had skittered away... I thought I'd gotten them all, but apparently not! Admittedly, some of the larger ones look quite a bit like kibble, but I have no idea how she managed to eat a whole one before realizing it wasn't actually catfood! The poor cat was sort of twitching all over and licking around her mouth like she was trying to get rid of the taste. Hopefully this won't give her indigestion or something worse. And maybe she'll be just a tad more careful about eating random bits of food in the future!
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Date: 2006-08-29 04:46 pm (UTC)I remember feeding my horse a piece of tomato once, thinking I was giving him a treat, and he made this awful face and spat it right out. But I'll bet the pepper was worse.