Long Weekend

The week after Easter meant a week of vacation from school!  After a few obligations early on in the week--karate, orthodontists, etc.--we made arrangements to spend the night at a hotel just outside of Portland.  We headed down on Thursday and had a few adventures over the next few days.

We visited with Mike & Laura and their new baby, Malcolm.  The kids took turns holding him (heavily supervised, of course), and we went out to dinner on Friday evening.




Little Mikey MacMaster turned 9 weeks old on the day of our visit and was about 12 lbs.  Good lookin' chubby cheeks!

The kids also got to play with the instruments, too.
Cammie and Ben took turns playing with the squeeze box...

And Ben was really taken with the skinny little guitar.  It's just his size!

On Thursday, however, I got to spend some time with Heide.  We went out for sushi while Kelly took the kids to the movies.  We looked at homes that she is interested in moving to that will downsize their house and expenses, and did a little geocaching on the way.  Heide found one of them just a few paces away from one of the houses she was looking at.

Heide and I took in a quilt show on Friday that just happened to be going on.  The theme was Red and White, so there were several quilts that were just those two colors, but of course, I was drawn to the scrappy ones!









When we returned from our visit, we had one good night's sleep and then got together with some friends and supporters of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation on the 12th annual Troll Stroll!  Our team was small, but we had a good time.  Lauren, Branden, and Daniel were part of our registered team, and we had Bekah and her boyfriend, Neil, joined us for a time before they headed out to get a late lunch.

Lauren ran into a friend who was part of the stroll last year, and here he was again...in a tutu.  Don't ask...you know, what happens on the Stroll stays on the Stroll.

At the end, I went to find a geocache up near the troll (it was actually two blocks away), which I thought was high time for me to go see.  After more than 20 years of living in the area, it's a shame that I have taken so long to go see this local icon.  I had to find the perfect place to stand in order to get the troll in and cut out the bums sleeping under the bridge and the camera man (whose lens still got into the right side of the frame) and the many tourists who took turns posing with the troll.  Someone took a bunch of chalk to the statue, which you just have to ignore.

Tomorrow...back to school.  I need to get to bed or it'll be a really hard morning.