Four Days of Fun

What do you get when you cross cute cat pictures, silly captions and America's pastime? You get "I Can Has Cheezburger" Night with the Seattle Mariners. Over 1000 cheez fans showed up for the game last Thursday night and cheered on the Mariners to a victory over the Texas Rangers. Being fans of both LOLcats and baseball, Todd and I knew this was a "must attend" event for us.

Here I am embracing the theme by wearing my Cheezburger t-shirt while eating a cheeseburger on Cheezburger Night.
Here is Todd willfully ignoring the theme by wearing a University of Minnesota shirt while eating chili-cheese fries on Cheezburger Night.


On Saturday, Kevin and I attended the second of our Adopt-A-Vine events at Chateau Fair le Pont winery. This session was all about blending and was educational, fun and, using proper wine lingo, yummy. Each table got three bottles of wine made from pure varietals: cabernet sauvignon, nebbiolo and merlot. We also got beakers, pipette and Erlenmeyer flasks to play wine scientists. The whole point of this was to play around with percentages of wine and make a tasty blend.

We were all amazed at how adding 2% more of one varietal and dropping another varietal 2% could change the flavor of the wine so dramatically. I think we tried probably eight different combinations before we came up with the blend our group liked the best.

While we were at the winery we visited the vines we "adopted" and pruned in April to see how they were doing. Here is Kevin with Sarah (pronounced like Syrah .. she is a pretentious vine, you know)

Here I am with Matilda. Who do you think is winning the "my vine will totally kick your vine's ass" competition?

Later that night Kevin surprised me with tickets to see Leavenworth Summer Theater's outdoor production of "The Sound of Music". He had no idea I had been wanting to see this for years now. He just thought it sounded like something we would both really enjoy. What a wonderful boyfriend I have.

This is the view from the seats.
You couldn't ask for a more perfect location for this play than in the hills in Leavenworth. Maria even came down from the woods on the hill next to the stage singing the theme song. I didn't grow up with the movie; in fact I didn't even see it until about five years ago, but the music is something that has become such a huge part of our cultural landscape that I could almost sing along with every song. A wonderful end to a beautiful summer day.

Swans and Snow

Friday night I took Mom to see PNB's "Swan Lake". Kevin joined us as well. It was another stellar production by the company but the ballerina we saw dance the Odette/Odille role two years ago was much better. This woman was good but the other dancer was amazing.

It was Mom's first really big outing since the knee replacement surgery and she did very well. She is eagerly looking forward to her next ballet experience. Next time though we are going on a weekend. To get us both there I had to leave work, rush home to change, rush all the way to Federal Way to get her, drive back to Seattle and then drive her back home afterwards. We almost missed the curtain. It is too much to squeeze into a Friday night.Saturday was filled with long overdue errands, chores, homework and a few hours of actual work. Nothing exciting but I got lots of necessary things done and a little bit of sleep.

Sunday morning Kevin and I went up to the pass to go snow tubing. The weather was glorious! Warm and sunny and fabulous. The problem is prolonged periods of warm and sunny and fabulous makes for some lousy tubing conditions. The tubes would stop about half-way down the lane and then you had to trudge down the rest of the way.

We had a good time even with the cruddy conditions. I also discovered that I lack basic snow tubing skills. What's that you say? You didn't know there were such things as basic snow tubing skills? Well, there aren't but I still managed to be completely incapable this time of going down the hill head first without tumbling off the tube. Kevin was able to snap this pic of a particularly spectacular FAIL I had on my last run of the day.

Yup. Still sliding down the hill. Been sliding for awhile at this point. I am made of awesome.

Evening at the Ballet

We went to see Pacific Northwest Ballet's "All Robbins" program on Thursday and it was amazing. The only thing I really knew about Jerome Robbins' work was his choreography for "West Side Story". I had no idea he was involved in ballet at all. Two of the pieces were more comedic and Broadway influenced and one was more traditional ballet. As usual the dancers were phenomenal. I am continually blown away by how graceful, powerful, and expressive they are. It is a sharp contrast to the ballet we saw last week by Ballet Bellevue. Don't get me wrong; the dancers at Ballet Bellevue are very talented and do things I could never even dream of doing. But it is kind of the difference between watching Double A and major league baseball. You have to be crazy talented to even perform at Double A but the talent gap between that level and the bigs is very noticeable. Same with the ballet. Seeing these two companies perform really brought home the skills of the dancers in PNB. They make everything seem easy and perfect. It is such a beautiful art form and PNB does it so well.