Busy times! Good stuff. Mark’s mom’s flight arrived just a tad late on Friday–so that we got to experience the full-on Portland rush hour bringing her home from the airport, oh well. At least we had plenty of time to get caught up in the car. Then I barbecued hamburgers, and they were MUCH better than my first effort. I’m really getting this barbecue thing down.
Which was good, because Saturday we had a deckwarming party, including having the grill going all afternoon! I am proud to report that I kept coals going, more-or-less steadily, for like six hours. I feel much more confident now. And many, MANY good things were cooked on it…we’d done it “BYOB and BBQ” style, so everyone brought what they wanted to grill. Fun!
It was a big party–nearly fifty people, near as we can reconstruct. At the end, we ceremonially burned a few pieces of the old deck.
That went well too–nothing burned that wasn’t supposed to burn. 🙂
Sunday, we went down east of Salem for a the 84th annual reunion of the maternal side of Mark’s mom’s family. Fortunately, that was a potluck too, so we were able to bring a lot of the leftovers from our party.
Even so, it took me till this evening to finish just the open bottles of wine.
Oh–speaking of wine! We were, quite coincidentally, given bottles of blueberry and blackberry wine this weekend.
But the piece de resistance was this:
We chanced to be talking to some relatives a month or so ago, and they asked Mark, “Do you want a spinning wheel?” “YES” he and I both said, before we even heard the rest…it’s the same spinning wheel that lived in his great-aunt’s house, that he was fascinated with as a child, and which is memorialized in chapter 18 of The Book of Joby. It now has pride of place in our living room–WITH an entirely gorgeous rocking chair that belonged to a different great-aunt.
This house is coming along nicely, I think.
Last, and also least: in culinary news, I invented a new dish tonight. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s what would result if someone in India read about cassoulet but had never seen or eaten it. And it is a direct result of too many weird and random leftovers in the fridge, plus fresh sage. But it was delicious!
