Irv’s Journal

After our little pumpkin carving fun in Seattle, Esther had the idea of carving pumpkins for our house too.

Sarah, Arnold, Irene, and Jerome came over on Friday night for some jack o’lantern fun.  I managed to find a website for patterns while I was looking for a Super Mario template.  Anyway the pumpkins turned out really nicely, but unfortunately have already pretty much expired.  Oh well! I guess our house won’t be decorated for Halloween afterall!

I’ll edit this post with pictures once I get them.

Just spent a weekender in Seattle at Amy and Sean’s with Esther, Sarah, and Janet.  It was a really fun trip.  Highlights included:

• The Seattle Underground Tour.  I highly recommend this to anyone visiting Seattle for the first time as a tourist.  Who knew that they totally rebuilt seattle after a great fire in 1888 and re-graded the city with fill from the mountains?  Some buildings lost a whole story… the dump was between 8 to 35 ft worth of fill!
• Salmon hatchery tour.  Wow.  I guess I never really thought about how salmon hatcheries worked.  Did you know that salmon fought their way back from the ocean, back up the rivers, just to get back to where they were born so that they could spawn/fertilize eggs and then die?  I didn’t.  This hatchery has a salmon ladder to simulate jumping up creeks and whatnot, it was crazy the amount of fight these fish had at the end of their journeys and how torn up they were.
• Pumpkin Patch.  We had a whole lot of fun going to a nursery with a real live pumpkin patch.  We got to pick and cut our own pumpkins straight off the soil, unlike here where most of the “patches” just have pumpkins sitting out on hay bales.  It was pretty wild as a few of us got competitive and looking for bigger pumpkins.  The biggest one ended up being nearly 33 lbs!!!
• Pumpkin carving.  Believe it or not, this was my first time carving pumpkins.  It was super messy, and I picked the hardest pattern to follow, but in the end it was totally worth it to see my pumpkin lit up!
• Food.  Yeah, how could a trip be completed without food?  Pretty much every place we went to was a plus in my eyes (and mouth).  Duke’s Chowderhouse, 3rd Floor Fish Cafe, and Green Leaf Vietnamese Cuisine were all very tasty.

The only lowlight for me was that Kaila, Amy and Sean’s Alaskan Husky mix, managed to forget who I was again.  I was encouraged that she seemed to accept me upon our arrival on Thursday, but all of a sudden on Friday she was back to her old ways, hiding from me and growling at me.  Oh well, maybe it’s just not meant to be for her and I.  Who knows.

Of course you might be wondering where the heck my pictures are.  Well of course we had a little camera snafu during one of the days, and in general aren’t big camera bugs when it comes to touristy stuff.  Luckily, Sarah definitely is, and she has posted her pictures on flickr.

http://flickr.com/photos/sarahderd/sets/72157608199328563/