Sylvia's Scenario

  This title probably insinuates that the Mariner baseball season is over but it's not and that isn't what this post is about (although the Mariner season might as well be over since the rest of the games are away and there will be no playoffs for us.)  This post is about Nick leaving town for three days during his visit from Japan to play baseball in Portland at his college alumni game.  He's excited about playing in it this year because he's in pretty good shape since he plays on two teams in Japan and was invited to play on a third (photo above).  He only went to one of the games for the third team because they play after work and that makes for too long a day when he'd rather just go home.  The two teams he plays on are Japanese community teams. He l oves the Japanese camaraderie and the fact that they play in the mornings before work.  We went to one of hi s  games  whe n we visited in June and saw first hand how much fun t...

We had construction going on in our house recently so I've had to carefully plan my cooking and meal choices this past week.  My sister, Laurene, from Colorado came to visit with her husband, Roger, and decided to take down a wall while they were here. I've wanted that wall gone since the day we moved into this house because our dinning room was too small with the wall there.  I wanted a more open concept. This summer I finally started getting contractors to come to the house to give us estimates.  When we told Roger how much it would be, he said, "I could do that in a weekend!"  So, he did.   Before: After: Roger has a lot of experience with this sort of thing and has remodeled two of his previous homes so he knows what he's doing.  Bruce and my nephew, Skyler, offered a helping hand so it ended up being a family affair.    I LOVE, LOVE how it turned out!   We now have a larger dinning roo...

Boy, I feel old now.  After listening to John Keister  stand-up comedy show last night, Living and Dying in Seattle , so many memories have returned from the days of his local hit show Almost Live! from 1984 to 1999 that was about all things Seattle.  The show was so good that back then we would video tape it on our VCR and save them.  They were classics.  Like the sketches of the Californians all moving up to Seattle, Dick's Hamburgers turned into "Dudes"; the espresso babies needing their espresso fixes; Arthur Denny and Seattle's founding fathers pulling up onto Alki beach for the first time and hear that familiar sound of the steamed milk, SSSHHHHHH, with an Indian behind the espresso machine;  The High-Fivin' White Guys, who Keister referred to last night as saying he never thought he'd be spending the rest of his life giving people high-fives; the Ballard Driving School and how much Ballard has changed now.  He recalled the show's...

Yesterday, we celebrated Bruce's birthday by doing some of his favorite things, which everyone ought to do on their birthday, right?  Of course, his favorite thing is for me to cook a dinner and make his favorite  carrot cake   like we did in  2015 .  But his second favorite thing would be to go to a baseball game, have some good beer along with some good beer-tasting food to go along with it.  The Mariners were having a special beer-tasting event going on last night for season ticket holders and thirty-three people signed up for it, including us.  It wasn't as extensive of a beer-tasting as the one we went to for my bi rthday in  2015  hosted by  Schoo ner Exact  brewery but it was still pretty good.  This one was hosted by  Ghostfish Brewing  who provided two beers, an IPA and a white ale.   They are located just a few blocks from Safeco Field and are a small brewery of about fifteen barrels ...