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August 15, 2005
A Weekend to Remember
The weekend started Friday night, when Dawnise and I met Ian and Mary Ann for dinner @ their place in Wallingford.
We got the tour of their house - built in the early 1900's and well cared for over it's life - and walked over to Jitterbug for dinner. The waitress forgot to put in our appetizer order, so when I reminded her moments before the mains came out, she comp'd it and brought it anyway. Dinner was very good, and she managed to forget the three deserts we ordered, so we got four - one of them on the house as well. We walked back to their place, socialized a bit, and left to catch the 11pm ferry home. A very good time, looking forward to spending more time with them.
Saturday we had been invited to attend a Firefly marathon. All 13 episodes, in order, one sitting. It sounded like fun, but I was highly skeptical of my ability to macrame my ass into a sofa for that long without going irretrievably insane. We discussed compromises on the ferry home Friday night - most of them ending with "you (Dawnise) stay, I'll go home when I'm done, and pick you up from the Ferry when you get home." Dawnise decided against. At the time I was annoyed that she wanted all the pie or none of the pie, and guilty for scuttling plans. But I couldn't imagine it ending well. I'd be "done," she wouldn't, and we'd have to hash it out then.
Anyway - we woke up a bit late, I made breakfast, and Dawnise decided it was a good day to find the brewery we'd passed a few times on our way across the hood canal bridge. It was named, sensibly enough, the Hood Canal Brewery. Took us about 20 minutes to get there. The brew-master and his S/O (wife?) were in the process of brewing, and there were a handful of folks in the tasting room. I had the sampler - 4oz of the seven different beers they brew.
It was clear that drinking that much beer (7x4=28oz for those playing along at home) before lunch was a silly idea - so I focused on the ones that grabbed me. The IPA, the Stout, Porter, and Barley-wine were all very tasty, the Special Ale and Amber only "so-so."
We left the brewery and headed back home, with a couple stops en route, and started thinking about dinner. We had had BBQ'd some really good salmon a few days back, so we turned the rest into salmon salad and had salmon salad sandwiches while we watched The Big Lebowski. (I must not "get" the Cohen brothers. It was just odd - not particularly funny, not particularly deep, just odd. Yea, it was a transformation of a Daschel Hammet sort of detective noir, but that hardly makes it notable.)
Sunday morning we got up, got dressed, and drove down to Gig Harbor for a day at faire. It was pretty warm out (high 80's - which is "hot" for WA, but only comes in as uncomfortably warm on the I've-lived-in-the-desert-most-of-my-life scale) and the site needed more shade, but it was the first faire we've been to up here where the mundanes didn't completely outnumber "us." It was a "Renaissance Fantasy" faire, and the fantasy element was definitely notable. Even a game (as in RPG) store had a booth. Hawking D&D at Faire - it's such a natural idea, I wonder why I never saw it before.
The other cool idea was a vendor selling soda. Cream soda, root beer, sarsaparilla, birch beer, and lemonade - you bought the bottle (large beer bottle, wine bottle, or larger) the first time and then paid a lesser rate for refills. If you wanted a leather carrier for your soda, they had them too. The Birch Beer and Sarsaparilla were really good - the lemonade just "ok." Another great idea - damn near half the fair was walking around toting bottles.
Made Stuffed Peppers for dinner, and generally relaxed before turning in.
Woke up this morning with a crick in my back - but even that can't put a damper on the weekend.
Posted by dberger at August 15, 2005 8:10 AM
Comments
Your soda vendor sounds like the one down at the Hoggstown Faire in Florida. Bought the bottle the year we went down there after we moved to Georgia. "DragonsBlood" I believe it was called. Blue glass bottle??
Posted by: Mom at August 15, 2005 4:45 PM
Thank God! Someone else who doesn't get The Big Lebowski. I thought I was the only one.
Posted by: Cosmo at August 16, 2005 9:53 AM