Oneunta Gorge

April 23, 2017

I'm a big fan of Peter Lik.  He's an incredible photographer and his landscape photography is just amazing.  My boss bought a picture for his home and I just love it.  I figured out where it was so I wanted to see what it was like in person.  Here's the pic...note, this was taken in 2012.

Isn't it beauuuutiful??  Anyways, as I was researching this, as always, the websites say that this location gets really crowded and during certain times of the year (i'm assuming winter/spring) the water can get up to chest high!  It's a very short hike, maybe 1 mile roundtrip.  

Here's how I got there:

As you can see the parking lot is very small.  This is 6:30 in the morning.  Yup. You know me, I hate crowds.  Poor Randy, I always drag his butt out of the house in the wee hours of the morning. I think people must camp around there or something because I have no idea where the people were.

If you see this sign....TURN AROUND.  THIS IS THE WRONG WAY.  We must've walked about 20 mins before I figured it out.  Sigh...

Look for the staircase right after the tunnel/bridge.  Sorry, the staircase is at the far right of the picture, I cut it off

You see this when you get down the stairs.  

Very quickly you run into this.  This log jam was pretty high.  This was the scariest part of the hike. Once you get over this you're home free.

Randy needed to change into his surfing booties...

Speaking of shoes, I scored!  I found these $20 wet/dry shoes at Costco a few months ago

I also found this wet/dry bag for my camera and belongings from Amazon.  I think it was about $20.  

The water got about thigh deep.  This is where it normally gets waist-chest high.  We were lucky although the pictures aren't as nice because at certain parts it was dry.

When you get to the end you reach the waterfall

Randy has a thing about swimming in crazy places.  It was 61 degrees!!!

Ooops.  We saw this after we came back up to the bridge...

By the time we were heading back out a whole bunch of people were trickling in.  I'm soooo happy I went early.  We left the house at 6am, and since there was no traffic we got there fast.  If I didn't go down the wrong path in the beginning we would've had the place to ourselves longer.

We worked up an appetite for breakfast so we went to eat some biscuits and gravy

This was delicious!!  I ordered biscuits with shiitake mushroom gravy and a side of fried chicken.

Randy ordered the classic sausage gravy but I liked mines better :)

Oregon Coast

August 22, 2017

I've never been to Portland so since we were going to Seattle I told Randy I wanted to spend a few days there.  The two main places I wanted to see (which actually aren't in Portland) were the coast/Cannon Beach, and Oneunta Gorge.

We left Seattle early on the morning of the 22nd since we only had two nights there. I wanted to get in as much sightseeing as we could.  We dropped off our bags at our rental around noon and headed straight for the coast.  We started off at Tillamook Factory.  I love their cheese and my co-worker Davin said the factory was worth going to.  Unfortunately their factory is under renovation so they moved the visitors center to another location for now.  They have a little cheese tasting station and then a gift shop...then ICE CREAM!! It was really cheap.  Randy had the bright idea of "you might as well get two scoops, it's only a dollar more..."  This was only $5!  It was HA-UGE.  You can't really tell in this picture.  I ate about half, then threw it away.  It was way too much and my cone broke on me so my ice cream was melting all over me.  This is mudslide + mint chocolate chip.  YUMMMM

About 15 minutes north you start to hit the coast.  It's beauuutiful.  We stopped by one of the view points

Soon after you reach the beach area...

I saw this sticker and I thought it was cute

I wanted to stay for the sunset but it was only 6:00 and the sun wasn't going to set for another 2 hours.  We didn't want to drive through the dark so we headed back to Portland.  Gotta wake up early tomorrow for a quick hike!

Tom Petty/Seattle

August 18-21, 2017

Randy and I are big Tom Petty fans.  We found out earlier this year that he was playing in Seattle so we jumped at the chance on getting some tickets.  Randy also has family in Seattle so it was nice to see them again.  I suck.  I didn't get any pictures of them....

We rented a house for the first two days and then we stayed with is his cousin Debbie and her husband Brian for the next two.  We got really lucky on the weather.  It was beautiful!  Our rental was in the Fremont district, right around the corner from the troll under the bridge.  I can't believe how popular this guy is!!  There's always about 20 people there whenever you pass by.  I made Randy go with me at 8:00 in the morning so I could beat the crowd.  We weren't even the only ones there.  But by the time we got there the three other people left.

The concert was at Safeco Field...sold out!!  30,000 people!  It was a great concert.  He never lets us down...

It's super hard taking a selfie in front of these things.  Between the glare and the changing of the pictures, you gotta be ready!  We must've taken about 10 pics before we got a half way decent one

We were hungry for sandwiches so we tried out this place called Tat's.  Meh.  It was ok.  I wouldn't go back.

My friend Jason told me about a frozen custard place called Old School Frozen Custard.  We went around 9pm so most of the flavors were sold out.  It was reallllly goooood.  I want to go back when there's more flavors I can try

August 21 was the morning of the eclipse.  We didn't realize this when we booked our vacation, Randy had mentioned it to me while researching things to do.  We were thinking of driving down to Portland a day earlier to catch the total eclipse down there but we decided against it.  Good thing, they said it was a 6 hour drive from Seattle with all the traffic.  Lucky for us Debbie said that as long as you are looking to the Southeast then we should be fine.  Her house faces Southeast!!  Seattle would be in the 90% totality range, good enough.   She lives in Queen Anne, here's the view right down the street from her house.  We were walking around staking out eclipse spots...

One more bonus...her neighbor across the street said we can just hang out on her lanai and watch 

the eclipse from there!!!  SCORE!!  So we grabbed our eclipse glasses and headed across the street. 

I don't know if any of you have ever used these glasses but you can't see ANYTHING through these things!  It's amazing how protective they are too because the sun was super bright that morning.  You see the hat?  It's covering my lens, I wasn't sure if my homemade filter was going to work so I didn't want to take a chance and have the sun shine into it for too long.  Like my shirt? ;)

Homemade filter you ask??  Well there was a theory that I remember hearing back in x-ray school that you can use unexposed xray film as your protection while looking at sun.  The silver bromide that layers on top of it acts as a natural filter.  One problem.  No one uses xray film anymore!  We are all in the digital age and it's rare that anyone prints films anymore.  Also the dry laser printer uses different film so I wasn't sure if it would work.  With lots and lots of googling I found out that the film that we use in the office does have a silver coating.  Perfect!  The film was expired so no one would care if I took a few sheets.  I layered two sheets onto my filter just in case one wasn't enough...

 I guess it worked cause my pictures turned out fine. yay!  This was the sun at it's peak coverage, at 10:21 PST

Not as exciting as I had thought.  It just looks like a crescent moon!  And it didn't get very dark either.  I was hoping to see a huge difference in lighting.  It got really cold though.  Maybe about a 10 degree difference.  That was bizarre.  It was really hot waiting around for it.

I'm only showing this so I don't forget my settings.  I was at ISO 100

Seattle was fun, we even got to see some other cousin's of Randy's that we rarely get to see....but ahem, no pics again.  Fail.  Off to Portland next!

Lennox

Kakaako

Meet Lennox....he's turning one soon and mommy Vikki needed some pics for his invitation.  I saw this wall on the internet and I was on a mission to find it!  Good thing I plenty friends that pay attention so they knew exactly where it was...It's on the Fisher wall next to Mother Waldron park.  It's awesome because since it's not facing the street I didn't have to worry about cars parked in front of it!

I took some test shots before they arrived

So cute yah!!

Baklava

I always wanted to try and make Baklava but was always scared to.  It looks really difficult and I've never really worked with phyllo dough before.  It's my co-worker's birthday (happy birthday Joanne!) so I thought I'd finally give it a try.  I found a recipe on pinterest, it was good because it had lots of pictures and a video.  You can find the recipe here.  Of course she made it look super easy, with her hair all nice and not a drip of sweat running down her.  Anyways, this recipe totally tests your patience.  It uses 40 layers of phyllo dough, and after every layer you brush melted butter on it.  The first step is 10 layers.  So yup, dough, butter, dough, butter...etc.  I swear after 5 layers if you're not paying attention you're gonna lose count and not know what number you're on.  After the 10th layer you sprinkle your nuts and then start again, except with only 5 layers.  Then nuts.  Then 5 more layers. Don't forget to butter your sheet after every one!! Sigh...so here's how it went

10 sheets

Nuts

5 sheets

Nuts

5 sheets

Nuts

5 sheets

Nuts

5 sheets

Nuts

10 sheets

By the time I finished my last set was 11 sheets.  Who knows where I skimped.  Good thing they're really thin so you can't tell.  I only took one picture.  I don't know how other people blog their stuff.  My kitchen was a mess.  There's no way I was pulling out my camera for this....

It actually was pretty tasty!  It was a bitch cutting it, you have to do it before you throw it in the oven so your layers were moving all over the place.  I don't know how the girl got hers to look so nice.  I didn't even bother to take a picture of my pan.

Jalna is now a vegan!

Did you know that Jalna is attempting to become a vegan?  Go check out her blog to see her progress...I must say, she's very lucky because her son, who is trained to be a chef, is serious about changing their lifestyle.  His food is good!  There's no way I'd be able to handle if I had to do all this on my own.

I thought I'd help her out and look for a vegan snack for her to reward her for her suffering (actually she's not suffering too much I think, she wasn't a big meat eater to begin with). I found a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and it looked pretty good.  Bonus that I already had all of the ingredients in my kitchen.  We were already scheduled to go to brunch with Michele, her cousin V,  and fellow blogger Kat so I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try out this recipe. I found it on pinterest but you can get the recipe here 

Another bonus, very little ingredients!  

I got permission from Jalna to use regular chocolate chips and not vegan since they were semi-sweet and not milk chocolate...

I prepared the dough last night so I could freshly bake them this morning before brunch.  It didn't make too much, a little over 2 dozen.  I think I'll double the recipe next time.

Success!  They came out pretty good, and not as coconutty as I expected.  I thought I wasn't gonna like it but I do!  

I finally got to use my sealer that Jalna bought me for an early Christmas/birthday gift...uh yah.  My birthday is in February. hahaha!!