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We had a full house this weekend with people visiting. Travis and Matt came up from Oregon and my mom came over too. My mom did a few spiritual profiles for people here on the west side and used our basement. Travis just came up to hang out and see his good ol’ Seattle friends. Matt needed a break from Eugene and his PhD chemistry studies. It was a good excuse for Kim and I clean up a little bit since I at least have been getting kind messy.

Saturday morning Kim cooked everyone crepes for breakfast and then we went to farmers market in the U-District. Kim had to interview a farmer for her sustainability cooking class. The rest of us ate samples and bought wine. Then we walked down the Ave and peeked in various shops. For lunch we went to Agua Verde.

After all the eating and walking we came home to rest and watch Spaceballs before getting ready to go out to Caranaval.

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On Waleska’s recommendation Jacob, Kim, Matt from Oregon, Travis and my mom all decided to go to a Brazilian Carnaval. It was at the Mountaineers Club. The main attraction was live music and dancing. There was kind of a dance lesson, but it felt more like an aerobics workout to me. It was fun to get everyone out dancing though. I was especially glad to see my mom moving around after her hip surgery. She did a lot of walking and dancing this weekend. I think most of the people there were Brazilian, because I heard a lot of what I assume to be Portuguese being spoken. We’d dance, then sit and drink a little, then dance some more, taking in the people dancing on stage and a few costumes. Lots of fun.

We were all getting a little tired and things were winding down a little after midnight anyway, so we wanted to find a bar to go to. I’ve been wanting to go to Earls on the Ave since it moved to see what it was like, and boy is it disappointing. It’s totally lost that Earl’s feeling it once had. It’s where the All American used to be and it seems to have the same crowd. Michelle is still mixing drinks, but Travis’s drink wasn’t that impressive. The Earl’s I once knew and enjoyed, and counted on to get me drunk off two long islands, is gone.

Travis came up from Portland for the weekend and was going to see a group called Awesome. What can I say, the name is awesome. Unfortunately, their show wasn’t. Travis and his friend Joe who have liked the band in the past, also were very disappointed in the show. It was a very free form sort of performance, kind of like free jazz, but not improvised and not jazz. It was in a church, which was cool, but it made absolutely no sense to me and wasn’t all that fun to listen to. There were parts that made me very sleepy and caused me to lay down on the bench and shut my eyes, but then there were parts that were loud and dissonant. There were lots of instruments including a banjo, castanets, a flute I think and typewriters. Interesting. There was also a spoken word part in the middle that involved lots of repetition of phrases that made absolutely no sense to me. Not even interesting.

Based on what Travis and Joe said, I won’t write Awesome off forever, but I’m not all that excited to go see them again. Except for the name. It’s awesome.

Thao and Tai recently got engaged and so evited all their friends to celebrate at The Wonder Bar in Wallingford. The whole Terry 7th floor crew was there. It’s always nice to see them, but I realize that I’m growing apart from a lot of them and see them only rarely. Such is life. Stephanie is moving to New York on a whim, Anna seems to be liking living on her own in Kirkland, and Betsy and Wes look great. Jacob and Waleska were the others there and I’d say I see them all the time since I live with Jacob, but that’s not true. So it was nice to catch up with everyone.

There were a couple professional photographers who were roaming around. I don’t think they took very good pictures. Maybe these aren’t the pros pictures. I hope not anyway. There was also a guitarist who was kinda cool until he was joined by some elevator music quality keyboards. The bar was okay, but not someplace I’d hang out. Thao and Tai were pretty busy talking to other friends and family, so we didn’t talk much, but it was fun to see them and their family together.

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Kim and I hung out with Danny and met his girlfiriend Kari. I met Danny at his apartment on lower Queen Anne and hung out until Kim got done with her dress fitting. We walked around Pike Place together. We saw Spoonman. Then we to dinner at Thaiger Room and went home. Oh yeah, and a chocolate that someone on the street handed me melted in my pocket and got into my phone. Now the ear speaker is a bit on the quiet side. I’ll have to open it up and see if I can get the chocolate out.

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My old friend Danny has moved to Seattle now that he’s graduated and got a job at Boeing, so I finally saw him to go skiing. Boeing had a special deal where it was only $12 to night ski at Snoqualmie. We thought there was a special deal on rentals too, so we didn’t bring our skis. Turned out to be full price so we rented snowboards to try something new. We had each only snowboarded a few times, so weren’t very good. Danny’s dad Mike skied while we boarded, and none of us had been on the slopes for a long time. The first few minutes we thought were going to be miserable the whole night since we could hardly move without falling. We finally started to catch on though, and by the end of the night we were able to make it all the way down the hill without falling. We even went over a few jumps, once or twice without falling.

I didn’t realize how late Snoqualmie stays open. We started around 4 and they’re open until 10. That’s almost as much skiing time as you’d get with a day pass. The runs are nothing amazing, but with a drive as easy as I90 and the discounted tickets, it was a helluva deal.

Our game night party we threw was a blast. Kim was worried that people weren’t going to show up, but that wasn’t a problem. I forget how many people there were, but I hardly got to see everyone in the short time we had. Rebecca, Michael, Jesse, Jessie, Vaughn, Thai, Thao, Betsy, Wes, Ramel, Jacob, Waleska, Kim and I are all that I remember, but I’m probably forgetting someone. We started at 7 and I think almost everyone was gone by 11:30. It’s so odd to me how often this seems to happen now that all my friends are out of school. Must be getting old.

We played a drinking game called Pass Out for a little while mostly as a joke. Then I tried to teach people to play Eukre and got two tables going, but I don’t think it caught on very well. I ended up playing a game called Pass the Pigs, where you roll pigs like dice for points. Another table of people was playing Simpson’s Clue I think.

After most people left we played Mario Kart for a while before heading to bed. It was a great time and I have a bunch of extra beer now since I think everyone who brought beer hardly drank it and left it for me!

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I took a day off to go skiing with April at Crystal Mountain. The beginning of the day was amazing for snow. The top of the mountain had been closed the day before for high winds so all the powder was untouched. Unforunately, the high winds continued and they closed the top of the mountain again around noon, so we were forced back to the lower runs. They were icy and the snow was choppy since it had been warm enough to melt a few days before and then froze again. The wind was ferocious too. I didn’t have anything to guard my lower face and had to skip the last few runs with April since my face felt chapped.

This was the first time I had been back up in about three years, and I forgot how much fun it was. I’ll be skiing more this season hopefully.

The Vegetarians of Washington, which Kim and I are members of, sponsor free classes that include yoga, nutrition and cooking. The class we went to today was at Whole Life Yoga in Greenwood.

The yoga section was a really good class. Kim even liked it and she’s kinda picky about what yoga classes she likes. The nutrition section was all about how a vegetarian lifestyle is healthier. It was very informative, but I knew most of the stuff already. There’s a good general overview of the basics of why to go vegetarian on many websites, but this little lecture had a lot of citations of medical studies that were fun to see. The cooking demo didn’t happen because some of food was forgotten, but that was okay because I was ready to go and we got tofutti chocolate as a consolation gift.

Kim and I are planning on going to Veg Fest this year to help out and give Kim a chance to meet some good vegetarian chefs – and to eat a lot of really good food of course.

Kim and I went with her friend Jessie to a pizza party with a bunch of people who work with Jessie at the Student Conservation Association. Sarah and Chris hosted the gathering and it was a ton of fun. It’s really nice to hang out with young, educated, passionate and environmentally minded people. It makes me more optimistic about the future of our world, although it also makes me sad to realize that it’s really a very small microcosm of our society.

We ate really good food including pizza that we helped make. There was no meat in site and I think almost everything was organic. I really liked the green olives stuffed with whole cloves of garlic. Between those and the pizza toppings, I ate a lot of garlic.

Once a bunch of people left it was down to just the hosts and Kim, Jessie and me. We were told to bring games and now it was a manageable enough number to play settlers of catan. Yes, again. That game is too much fun.