The Play's the Thing!

Over the weekend David and I took a trip to Ashland, Oregon to celebrate our 3rd anniversary.  Can you believe that it's already been 3 years? 

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People outside of Oregon may not be familiar with Ashland.  Why did we decide to drive 5 hours each way to visit a small town in Southern Oregon?  Here's a clue:

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That's right!  The Oregon Shakespeare Festival!  The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is not a weekend carnival-like event.  It is a permanent fixture in Ashland, with plays showing from February to October each year.  They put on several Shakespeare plays, but also have a variety of other play.  We saw two plays:

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"Pride and Prejudice"

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and "Twelfth Night."

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We also went on a backstage tour, and were lucky enough to get Kate Hurster, the actress who plays Elizabeth Bennet, as our tour guide!

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Since both our plays were in the evening, we did a couple of small outings outside of Ashland during the day.  One of these outings was to the Butte Creek Mill in Eagle Point.  The mill began operation in 1872, and is still active today.  We got to poke around the mill, and see some of the old equipment, including some gears with wooden teeth.

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A few months ago I bought a cookbook called Good to the Grain.  It is a baking cookbook that focuses on whole grain flours.  It has 12 chapters one each for 12 different whole grains.  While we were at the Butte Creek Mill we bought several new kinds of flour that I hadn't been able to track down before: Barley flour, Quinoa flour, and Kamut flour.

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All in all it was a great weekend.  We enjoyed both plays, had a great time walking all over downtown Ashland, and even had a pretty good drive, enjoying a couple of books on CD.

Weekend in Seattle

We spent the weekend up in Seattle celebrating David's Mom's birthday, as well as the Fourth of July.

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On Friday night we went to a sports bar for dinner; David was really excited about the Happy Hour specials! (Or maybe it was the cool painting . . . I'm not really sure.)

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There was all sorts of sports memorabilia, including the team pennants above.  (Yes Robby, I took this picture for you!)

Sunny San Diego

Last weekend I went down to San Diego to take the Professional Engineer Examination. The test was long (8 hours on Friday, then 5 hours on Saturday), uncomfortable (plastic folding chairs), and overall was an experience that I hope I never have to do again. But once I made it through the test, I got to hang out with my brother Robby who happens to live in San Diego.

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That's Robby at his house, playing guitar.

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And here's Shannon, Robby's girlfriend.
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Robby and Shannon live at the end of a road that ends because that's where the ocean begins. On Sunday we walked down the cliffs near their house to the Ocean Beach Pier (which you can see in the background of most of the pictures from that walk. Robby says that it's the longest pier on the west coast.)

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Me and Robby, trying not to be blinded by the sun.

.Shannon and Robby, walking near the tide pools.
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A tide pool. I think that I was trying to get a picture of a crab that was hiding between the rocks.
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The ocean.

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Me, splashing barefoot in the water. (Yes, I'm wearing only a t-shirt, no sweater. No, I wasn't cold. It was a lovely break from the rain in Portland.)

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On my trip back to Portland I saw the oddest thing in the San Diego Airport.
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An area in the San Diego Airport, filled with rocking chairs.

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(Oh yeah, one last thing: I won't get the results of my test for 13 weeks, so I can relax until then.)