Quite a Weekend!

This has been a very full weekend, and it's not even over yet. Actually, it started before it even was a weekend, with Thursday night fireworks!

Every year the folks at Emerald Downs sponsor a giant fireworks display, and this was no exception. Because I live so close to it, Suzie and I pedaled our bicycles over to the show. A great deal of the populace seems to go, and that can create quite the traffic jam getting out of there at the end of the show. Not if you're on bicycles though! Most folks just view the show from whatever vantage point they can, choosing to just sit on blankets or in chairs along the city street next to the track. We went to take pictures!. We threw our cameras and a couple beers into a bag and grabbed our tripods (having learned our lesson with our dismal fireworks failure in Walla Walla a few months earlier). The weather was perfect! We each took lots of great pictures and had a great time. Sarah didn't go with us because one of her friends invited her along with them to go inside the track. The three of us had a good time going over all the pictures before we went to bed, a lot of which are on our picture site.

The next day was July 4th, and that brought plenty of activity. Suzie was having a big family bash up at her house, and was expecting all her offspring and even a few others to show up, so she had a lot of preparations to do. After she left here that morning to head up to her house, I got busy making a killer oriental chicken salad. Sarah was going to spend the day with her boyfriend's family up at a Riverside Park in Renton. Apparently, they had quite a bit of traditional Cambodian food ready for the grill. Suzie's party wasn't due to start until about 2pm but I wanted to go up a little earlier and help her out. At about noon I took Sarah up there where she met a couple of the folks that were already there helping out. I spent a little while mowing her back yard to get that ready for the fiesta. At that time I took Sarah over to her boyfriend's house as their departure time was getting near for their whole family to caravan to Renton. When I got back we finished getting all the stuff set up. As I said, the party was due to start at 2pm, but it really didn't get started until about 5pm or so as I recall. It was a great event! Lots of gabbing, eating, and drinking, punctuated with the occasional firebug moment involving fuses on fireworks (the 3 F's?). When the daylight waned, everyone migrated a few houses down to her son Denny's house for the "middle-of-the-street" fireworks that lasted the rest of the night. At one point Suzie and I took a walk around the block to check out the activity on the next street over. What a war zone! The street was so littered with paper and shrapnel you had to be careful where you walked. They apparently knew they were going to be going overboard with their pyrotechnics, as they had tarps over 6 vehicles parked out front of their houses! When Suz and I finally retreated back to my house to go to sleep, we were OUT. It was a good night's sleep. Sarah came home shortly after we did, and also had a good time.

Yesterday we went to see the annual event in Tacoma, called Tall Ships. It was pretty impressive! We paid for the "premium" wristband that granted us boarding privileges to the best of them, and that included The Bounty. Yes, that was the one that was made famous in the movies. I believe it was used in Pirates of the Caribbean too, but I'm not sure. At any rate, even including the drizzle that we endured a couple times, the weather was just about right for a clustered, crowed event--Not too hot, not too cool. We got lots of pictures as usual. Check em out!

I'm not sure what today will bring. Teresa got back yesterday, but Sarah opted to stay over one more time last night. This place is sure in turmoil--A far cry from the way I usually keep it. It will be good to have "my" place back. A place where I don't have to dress if I don't want to, and a place where I know I won't find something sticky on my countertop or floor when I least expect it...

I'll probably go up to Suzie's place a little later in the afternoon (I just love that woman!) and maybe we'll go over some pictures or website issues or some other low-key thing that we enjoy doing together. She also expressed a desire for us to get going on making costume parts for me to wear at the Renaissance Faire that's coming up later this summer. That should be a hoot!