Finally spring…

I swear, it has been the coldest, rainiest, gloomiest spring in the Pacific Northwest.  I heard somewhere that it has actually been the crummiest spring since 1990.

This weekend was actually the first weekend where the weather was sunny and nice enough for shorts!  I needed this!

This last week I have had a bit more time to spend with friends.  A week ago, I went to a cocktail and food pairing tasting at a local restaurant with my friend Shelley.  There were seven courses of mini-cocktails, paired with delicious food!  It was a bit of a splurge, but it was so much fun!

Then Wednesday night was steak night with Jena and Audrey – so delicious and great conversation!

And Friday, I got together with Shelley, Tiffany, Toni, Danielle and Barb!  Six of us for great conversations and amazing Italian food.  It was definitely more social outings than I have had in a week for quite awhile.  It was much needed.

Then I topped it off with morning walks on both days, and Mom and I went to the matinee showing of Downton Abbey today!  Wonderful movie – they did a great job with it!  What a great week!

$2 Tuesday

Last night I went to the local West Coast league’s baseball game – the Bellingham Bells.  Despite looking like it might start to rain, we only felt a few drops and had a great time!  We watched a win, drank some beer and ate a gyro.  My friend’s company sponsored the tickets, and local micro-brew IPA was $2!

 

My favorite part was our photobomber!

What a fun evening!  I really needed that.

2018 Wine Walk

My life isn’t all vacations and rainbows – believe it or not, mostly it isn’t.  As such, even though it doesn’t always appear in the pages of this blog, I spend a fair bit of time around home.  Work, yard work, chores, and of course, planning and saving for the next vacation.

I missed the Wine Walk last year because I was in Hawaii (yea, yea, I know you don’t feel bad for me…) – so I was excited to go this year!

Me – Pre-Walk

The event is put on by our Downtown Partnership, who coordinate all the participating shops and wineries – they do a fantastic job.  I met Shelley downtown and we had a blast!  You get your little tasting cup and tickets, and wander all over downtown for wine and snacks at the various participating shops.  There were several other friends wandering around, so we stopped to chat here and there when we ran into people we knew.

Shelley and me with the town flag

(Note: Yes, our town has its own flag.  I think it is a hippie thing.  Or is it a hipster thing?  Either way – it seems weird, but why not do flag selfies!?)

Several Washington wineries participate and get big exposure in a few short hours!  Our local co-op grocery store did an awesome spread of healthy snacks, including veggies with hummus, Greek olives and dolmathes.  As it turned out, Shelley had never had dolmathes.  I said, “Just put it in your mouth.  Trust me – you won’t regret it.”  She didn’t regret it!

All the little shops had their pretties for sale, but I was good and didn’t buy anything, except one bottle of white wine.  I was tempted, but I am trying to save money…  We stopped in at the Cajun restaurant for a late snack, before heading home.

I LOVED this lavender flower-shaped Le Creuset!

Some of the pretties

Shelley’s Adult Lemonade

Yummy – oyster shooter!

My favorite wine was the Rosé by Eternal Wines in Walla Walla – it was so delicious and perfect for summer!  So, even at home, I try to have some fun!

 

Felting Party!

It started like this… About a month before Christmas, I was sitting at the lunch table with my coworkers reading Sunset Magazine.  We are lucky enough to have Sunset at the lunch table because one of my coworkers brings them in when she is done with them at home – although they are sometimes missing the good recipes…  This particular issue contained a picture that piqued my interest – a felted owl!

If you have seen some of my previous posts, I have a bit of an obsession with owls, and also lately, felted things.  For those of you who don’t know what felting is, this is my completely uneducated description.  You take wool, shape it into the shape that you want, and then you stab it precisely 10 million times with a barbed needle to compress the wool and get it to take on the shape you want.  You might think that stabbing it 10 million times might make it fall to pieces, but the barbed needle gets the outer layers of wool to mix together with the inner layers of wool and become very strong.  Ok, I imagine that was not really a helpful description at all.  But have no fear, you will eventually get it… I’m sure.  And if you don’t, well, you probably don’t care anyway.

So anyway, I apparently obsessed over the little owl in the magazine enough that my coworkers decided to get me one of the owl kits for Christmas!  And each of my coworkers also got a kit, and there was talk of having a felting party!  Which I hosted on Wednesday.  We all got together for appetizers and drinks and everybody brought their kits.  There was only one rule.  You couldn’t get a head start.  We were all supposed to be in this together!

The Felted Owl Kit

My Owl started out as blobs of wool… like this.

To be honest, felting is really like playing with a voodoo doll while strung out on meth (not that I have any firsthand experience with either).  You stab that sucker over and over and over again!  So we all shared who we were imagining on the end of our needle… I’m never telling…  We chatted and laughed and obsessed over whether our blobs of wool were ever going to look like the picture on the box.  One of my co-workers got a lot of grief for starting early… or in other words, she cheated!  She shaped the body over the weekend!  She was feeling guilty until my other co-worker admitted to watching a video about needle felting beforehand…  And on occasion, you heard “ouch!” when one of us stabbed a finger.  I don’t think anybody drew blood though!

This is what I like to call the “third grade girl” phase

But eventually they started to take shape!  And my owl was born!

We’ve Got Eyes!

We Are Looking Like an Owl Now!

We are having another felting party next month to finish our kits – I just have the little spots on the belly to do, and I was going to be adventurous and add some little feet, even though feet are an add-on!

And no, it isn’t just an excuse to get together and drink!  What do you take me for – a wine lush?