Sylvia's Scenario

This weekend, my brother is having a Pub Crawl in Seattle and even though "no girls allowed" is rule # 1, I'm still going to enjoy myself while I'm here.  Nick and Bruce are participating in it and we will meet at the Mariner game tonight. Same for tomorrow.  The Pub Crawl continues after the game and then my brother will allow me (or "girls") to join in.  At least, he did the last time. Here's a photo I took of them during the last Pub Crawl when I met them at the  Pyramid Alehouse  before going across the street to the Mariner game. After the game, we went to  Hale's Brewery   for stout floats which I had never had before and they were delicious! At Hale's, they bring out a big platter of brownies with the stout floats.  It takes a certain kind of stout for the stout float to taste so delicious and Hales makes the right kind. As you can see, everyone is feeling pretty good by the end of the day of pub crawling.  R...

My summer officially began yesterday with the arrival of Nick and Sachiyo from Japan.  I was so excited about them coming after they'd been in Japan since November for Nick's job. They were a little jet lagged but did pretty well. They arrived in Boise at 4:30 pm which was around 9:00 am their time. It was a 3 flight, 22 hour journey to get to Boise, Idaho.  I was planning to serve breakfast when they arrived but Nick did not feel like breakfast at all.  He reported that he felt like caprese!  Well, we don't have fresh tomatoes yet so we ended up ordering a caprese pizza from Smokey Mountain Pizza that we'd had a few weeks ago when we discovered the  Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe .  We also ordered a Bangkok Salad to go along with the pizza and it was just what they felt like before hitting the sack for much needed sleep. This morning we had our  health waffles and a leisurely breakfast at 11:00 am. Nick said he actually declined the United Airline...

Bruce got an interesting Father's Day gift his year.  Nick is still in Japan and sent this coin to Bruce for his gift.  He explained it in his card, which was very appropriate, as you can see. Inside the card Nick explained the coin.   This is the official project coin of the current CVN 73 USS George Washington Project in Yokosuka, Japan.  (FY 13 Selective Repair Availability).  This coin was personally handed to me by the Project Superintendent as a sign of his appreciation for the work I did resolving a particularly important maintenance issue in the reactor plant. On the back it looks like this. The coin is very impressive to us but to Nick he just gives them away to people when he receives one.  This is the second one he's received and he gave the first one to Sachiyo's dad.  He says that every Commanding Officer of an aircraft carrier has a special coin called the Captain's Coin.  People will receive one as a lit...

I recently returned from a trip to Iowa where Bruce and I visited his parents and a few nieces and nephews.  Bruce is from Iowa and we actually lived there a couple years in our early days of marriage and the main thing I remember about those days is all the corn. Lots and lots of corn growing in Iowa. Everywhere you look. I didn't know until I moved to Iowa that all this corn you see is growing to feed cattle, not for people.  I remember when Bruce started explaining to me how it all works.  The Iowa corn goes to animal feed, or for seeds to grown more corn, or for making inexpensive additives for processed foods.  I was so confused about it at the time.  But it did explain why Bruce always called corn-on-the-cob "sweet corn". I finally said to him during our early days of dating in Seattle, "why do you always say 'sweet corn', all corn is sweet!"  I wasn't from Iowa so I didn't know that there was 'seed corn' and '...