Happy Mother’s Day moms!  This morning Brent and I drove to Salem to hang out with my mom and grandma. We had a really good brunch at The Wild Pear yum, yum, yum. Of course we had some good conversations, as is our custom 🙂 We talked about a bunch of stuff but one thing that came up was the Oprah show coming up on Monday. I saw the preview, as did my mom and grandma, that said that her and Steadman have a daughter. Well there is barking in the background people and I am sure they are talking about a dog. My grandma “knows” that she really does have a daughter (i.e. tiny human, not tiny canine) so she decided to make a wager on it with me. So if I loose I have to trim my grandma’s grass with scissors (just like she does), and if I win (which I will) I get one of her little Buddha statues (score!!). It was hard to pick just one thing I wanted since my grandma has the coolest stuff ever, but I decided on something little since I pretty much KNOW I am going to win! Anyway we got home, it was starting to rain, and took pictures:

(we’re laughing so hard because Bill just said, “Ya, and I’ll get one all by myself later over here”)

No worries Bill:

After grandma left I took a long swim in the rain! It was so nice. My mom came out and did some movement studies on me while I swam. She took a ton of pictures, so a nice leisurely swim turned into a little bit of a work out, but it’s alright I needed it! Brent and I are here now. I am going to get creative! (results to follow)

I’ll deal with baseball first. Well baseball and Bj’s birthday, yay he’s 23!!!! On Bj’s birthday we drove up to Seattle pretty early (as soon as I dropped Nick off at school). The drive was really rainy and pretty gross. However when we got close to Seattle God smiled down and the sun came out. It was so, so nice. That is until we actually got to the game and started to BOIL!! We dressed for cold, with jeans, tennies, hoodies, multiple t-shirts, etc. with a backpack filled with additional gear including jackets and umbrellas. Well we both ended up sitting in a puddle of sweat with major t-shirt burns and freckles! But it was awesome baseball watching weather. We went to the game about an hour and a half early so we could hang out down by the field. We were so close to the baseball players warming up. Here’s me and Ichiro:

Okay that was actually outside Safeco Field. 🙂 Here is the players really warming up, this is what I saw when I first walked in, wow! (I had never been to Safeco before).

The game was great. We sat behind right field, section 106, row 29, seats 7 and 8. I liked the view of the field from here, and you know, of Ichiro’s butt:

Ichiro is HOT!

But so is Bj! View of Bj from his shortie after the game:

You just can’t tell how pink we are from here!
Okay so then after the game we went back to our hotel: Silver Cloud Hotel (Broadway). I am going to so recommend this hotel people. It’s great if you drive or take the train into town. They have a free shuttle that will take you just about anywhere (we went to and from Safeco, to Pike’s Place, got picked up at Sephora, then dropped off at a used bookstore). Also the picture of the place on their site looks so crappy. The hotel is new and really nice and so clean. I am a freak about hotel comforters after I saw that thing on 20/20 about seaman and everything on them, so I always take those off right away, but this hotel goes an extra step and has sheets on top of and underneath the blanket so you don’t have to touch anything that isn’t cleaned between guests!! I was so pleased to find this out that Bj and I took a nap after the game (we both went to bed late and got up early. Then we went down to the hotel’s bar/restaurant, Cyanne. It was good, we just chilled, Bj got to try a Mojito. After that we were pretty zonked so we headed to bed. We had the best intentions to get up early, but we didn’t. We caught the 12:30 shuttle into town, shopped around for a couple of hours, then realized we didn’t really have money to do that and went back to the hotel. We drove over to Uwajimaya to stoke up on our favorite Japanese foods. The regulations changed a bit and Taro can’t send me over the boatloads of candy I need to survive so I had to find another source. I even got my favorite Ramen snack, yay!!! I found some Fun Chop Chopstick Holders  for my chopstick challanged friends. I also decided that when I have kids I am starting them on chopsticks first! We got some yummy honey moon tea by Bubble Tea. The cups are the coolest:

Isn’t this the best idea, the lid is like vacuum sealed to the top, what a resource saver. These super thin lids don’t leak at all until you puncture them with the straw, they weigh almost nothing, and use a teeny tiny percentage of the plastic. All in all the trip was good. I may have started another addiction. I think I want a Blythe doll!! My Barbies have nothing on this girl. Made famous by this book the doll, which was only made in 1972 has a cult following. People dress her up, do her hair, and take pictures of her everywhere. Here are some great links:
XOXO Blythe (has some good history and shows you the difference between the originals and the Japanese remakes)
This is Blythe (the author’s website, has a forum and everything)
Primmadollies (makes awesome clothes for her dolls, so, so cute)
Changable Blythe (some more history)
Almost Daily Blythe (another fan site)
Live Journal Community of Blythe fans

And I bought myself this book at Uwajimaya:

It shows how to do her hair in a million funky ways. Ohhh I might have to get one!

Okay, this is my scary story about Black Butte. My family used to have a vacation house there that we shared with two other families. Our house was in the Glaze Meadow section of Black Butte. Our place was one of a few on a little cul de sac called Salal. Behind our house was forest service land, a whole bunch of trees and animals and nothing else. When we first got it I was about eight I think. At the very beginning of getting the place all the families came at the same time to do some work on the place (we got it not quite finished). Well after a day of working they decided to go out to dinner at the lodge and left all six of us (me, my little brother (age 6), josh (6), Matt (4), taylor (5) and her little brother (4?) with a baby-sitter. I think though, that the littlest kids were already asleep, it’s a little fuzzy. Anyway, I was the oldest so I was not asleep. After the rest of the kids were I was in the kitchen with her doing dishes or something. We were talking right in front of the kitchen windows that looked out over the forest. After loading dishes in the dishwasher we looked up to…. two guys wearing beanies cupping their hands against the glass to look in. We screamed and the baby-sitter grabbed the phone. Soon the police were there and our parents hurried back from dinner. Okay now, nothing really happened and they didn’t try to get in, but THEY NEVER FOUND THE GUYS!!!  ahhhh. The police think that the guys might have been living in the house before we bought it. When we got it we found things like curdled milk in the fridge and other clues that people had been squatting there. Well it totally freaked me out, and I hate having windows open at night where people can just walk up to them (especially out in the middle of no where). I really don’t like the blinds open at night either. I don’t know if I have all the details right, mom, dad, do I?