Sylvia's Scenario

As always, July is flying by with all the celebrations this month.  Nick's family is not here this year so that makes it a little more quiet (since he has three summer birthdays in his family) but Lauren was here one weekend so we celebrated her, we've celebrated  my birthday  and last weekend we celebrated our anniversary; a significant one of 45 years.   Since it was such a turning point anniversary, we also took a trip in May to celebrate by taking a seven day Alaska cruise that left out of Seattle so it was super easy to do.  We've always love cruises and now we decided we like cold weather cruises, too. Alaska was so fun; bundling up and being in cold, snowy weather in a vast wildness was very exciting. We may do a coolcation more often.  We took the White Pass & Yukon Railway at Skagway and it was so snowy up at the top of the pass.   The train is a real old-fashioned train that rides on a historic narrow-gauge railroad built in 1898 for the ...

My birthday this year was one of my most fun yet.  It was simple but quite effective as I delivered on my vow to do a cold plunge in Puget Sound.   I'm pretty sure I have not been swimming in Puget Sound since I was a teenager.  The reason is because it is so freakin' cold!  Notice how we are the only ones in the water...the only ones crazy enough, I should say.   It actually was not that bad.  On this day, it was 59 degrees so it wasn't so cold that you turned numb.  I remember turning numb when swimming in Puget Sound in the summer.  But, hey!  In this day and age of global warming, I do believe Puget Sound is getting warmer because we were all able to plunge in at least three times.  And each time it felt better and better.  In between plunges, we recuperated in a mobile sauana by  Suana Moon  in a balmy 200 degrees.   We've seen the mobile sauna down at Alki beach before and I knew the first time I saw it that I w...

In our family, Father's Day and baseball go hand in hand so once again this year we were off to another Mariner baseball game for Father's Day, one of Bruce's favorite pastimes.  My brother was visiting so he and his wife joined us.  They were here to attend the World Cup where Seattle is one of the cities in North America hosting games.  We are having six games here, including the USA team where they won their match. It was definitely on my brother's bucket list to experience such a thing since they are huge soccer fans so I'm glad we could accommodate them during their visit. Father's Day was a beautiful day this year and the Mariners won so that always makes it more of a fun day.  Bruce barbecued hamburgers which is another one of his favorite pastimes - having a barbecue.   My sister brought a fruit salad, my nephew brought our favorite  Pasta & Co.  house salad, and I made a family favorite  pasta colelsaw . Bruce offered three kinds of c...

Happy 2023.  We started our New Year with the most delicious dinner on New Year's Day at our house watching the Seahawk football game (they won- Go Hawks!) and then we had a few people over for dinner.  It turned out to be a really fun day and a good opportunity for me to cook up this ham that we get every year from a vendor that Bruce works with.  It's an Amana Ham from Iowa.  Amana is a quaint German town in Iowa that we visited many times when we lived in Iowa in the 80's.  Bruce had a friend from college who was from Amana and his family owned the restaurant in town called the  Ronneburg Restaurant  that is still there.  We had many good meals and lots of fun memories with the Oehler family at that restuarant.  Now, we still get a taste of Amana every year with this ham that we receive.  I try to cook it when we will have a lot of people over.  In past years, we've served it for our Super Bowl parties that we would host before t...

This year, Valentine's Day was extra special to us because we had Bruce's twin sister from Great Falls, Montana visiting for the first time since we moved back to Seattle. I made a special Valentine's Day dinner and Lauren also came over.  We had everyone's favorite Teriyaki Flank Steak , rice, red and golden beets and Show the Love Salad . For dessert, I made the gluten-free chocolate cake that I made for Lauren's birthday  here only I made them in little heart-shape cake tins.  These are always fun to make and decorate for Valentine's Day.   I used some of Nick and Lauren's childhood handmade Valentine's for table decorations. And, of course, I made our traditional Valentine cookies . Our dinner table looked quite festive with party favors at each place setting with colorful confetti inside. Lauren enjoyed popping her's open and dotting the table with more colorful glitter.   Our Valentine's dinner was the h...