Busy Weekend

We somehow have one of those magical and unusual weekends where we don't have anything scheduled, so of course, I had to find as many options to fill it as possible:

Friday night Rachel invited us over for dinner.  Well, actually, she invited us over for Thursday, but it's a long story...

Not being eager to spend any more time in her hot apartment than necessary, Rachel changed it up and we met at Carkeek Park.  (Although, now that I think about it, this could have just been her clever ploy to avoid cleaning her apartment, hmm...)  But I'll take any excuse to be outside in this new-fangled sunshine that seems to have come out of nowhere.  Rachel made a wonderful dinner, but the piece d'resistance was the drinks:

Each in it's individual watermelon cup, with umbrella straw, no less!

This morning I took on the job of pressure-washing the front porch.  It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, but haven't gotten around to.  Since we borrowed the pressure washer for the back deck, I figured I should do it now before we return the pressure washer to my Dad.

Before:

I learned a few things in the process:

1. Start at the top and work your way down (duh!) EXCEPT on the stairs.  Then you should do all the risers first, or you'll just spray crud all over the stair above that you just cleaned.

2. Have an exit strategy.  I knew I wanted to do the porch, and I knew that I didn't want to do the ENTIRE driveway, but finding a graceful stopping point is not as easy as it looks.  So we may have a few random splotchy spots across our driveway.

3. Our porch is actually darker than I thought.  Although there is a notable improvement in the appearance (without the moss garden growing on the stairs), it didn't get as light as I expected.  But it looks much better.  Which you can't really tell in the photo, as evidenced by the fact that I mixed them up the first time.  I think this really is the after-photo...

After:

I spent the rest of the morning at the gym swimming.  I've taken up swimming this week, not so much for the exercise (since I'm not exactly working hard), but just for the pure joy of spending a half-hour free from gravity.  That and I read that it can help with the swollen-ankles curse.

In the afternoon we headed down to Greenlake to see the Coughlin Porter Lundeen boat race in the Seafair Milk Carton Derby.

The weather was fantastic, and the group had staked out a great spot just by the end of the race.

The CPL boat was an engineering marvel and they won handily.

Of course, what else would you expect from a boat that is: 1. Designed & built by engineers and 2. Manned by four 20-something guys?

They left the competition in the dust.

This is the CPL boat:

This is everyone else:

I couldn't fit both in the same photo.

We came home & I pulled weeds in the garden until I had filled the compost and the spare-compost bin and I collapsed in a heap in the grass.

My finished product:

I know, it doesn't look like much, and I didn't take a before picture, so you'll have to believe me that it looked something like this before:

Keith, meanwhile, started staining the deck (these are the stairs, I can't figure out how to rotate the picture):

After recovering from my weed-pulling/jungle taming adventure, I made a Peach Pie.  Just in-case carrying his baby isn't enough to endear myself to Keith.

Yes, it's a touch over-done.  My oven & I are in negotiations at the moment.  I think it should interpret 425-degrees literally, but it seems to think it's okay to be 10-20 degrees under that.  I'm starting to get on to it's game, so I keep setting the temperature higher each time, guess I over did it this time.  Always learning...

After all this, I'm ready for bed, or a massage.  But I'll take just having Keith make dinner: