Heat Wave

You can tell that it's hot when the leading headline on a news website is about the weather. I think that my favorite line in the article is:

The heat is expected to dip to 100 by Thursday.

Mahjong

Last week we went over to our neighbor's house for dinner and a round of mahjong. Mahjong is a fairly long game (four rounds, each having a minimum of four hands), so we've been playing a round every few weeks, with the hope of finishing the game sometime this summer.

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Marty and David enjoying pizza before the game.

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We played round 2 (south wind). When we started the round I was in 4th place, and David was in 3rd.

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Brianne and Kristine mid-hand.

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Well, I won 2 of the 4 hands, but somehow I'm still in 4th place. David has jumped ahead to 2nd (only 4 points shy of 1st!).

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One of my winning hands.

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Marty discarding.

Weekend at the Coast

Over the weekend we went to the Oregon coast to photograph a wedding. The wedding went well, and we got lots of good pictures. We stayed in Astoria, where it rained violently! We were going to check out the Astoria Sunday Market, but instead took shelter in a cute coffee shop, with a huge jungle mural.

That's me, with a huge elephant in the background.

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Then we stopped in Clatskanie and had coffee with our friend Lisa, who recently returned from France. (Wow. It sounds like we had a lot of coffee. I think we actually had hot chocolate with Lisa!)

Lisa and David.

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On our way back to Portland, we followed the STP (Seattle to Portland bike ride) route. We saw a multitude of tandem bicycles, one unicycle, and one bicycle-built-for-three.

A tandem bicycle.

Amaretto Cherries

About a week ago we bought a flat of cherries, and set to work making amaretto cherries.

To make the process easier, we bought a cherry pitter. I had my doubts as to how well it would work. I figured that it would either take off half the cherry with the pit, or mangle the cherries. However, it worked beautifully, and we ended up with some lovely looking jars of cherries.

Welcome to Fiske Cottage!

Testing 1 2 3 . . .

Does it work?