On Wednesday I went to my first ever Sounders game. The Seattle Sounders are the city's soccer team. This year has been their inaugural season, and they have drummed up quite a following in very short order. People here have literally gone Sounders crazy.



When the team enters the field for the first time, all sorts of shiny confetti is shot in the air, making the field "sparkly" for the whole game. I never new sparkles were part of soccer, but it was pretty.




I went with the Swedish Cultural Center, who were supporting the new Swede on the team. I can't believe that I lived in NJ for most of my life and the first time paint my face in support of a sports team, I'm on the west coast.

Went on a "do over" hike this weekend. I had done this hike May of last year. I blogged about it, but I'm posting about it again because this experience was totally different due to the fact that there was no SNOW at the end of the hike and there was an actual lake, rather than something frozen over.

On Friday I volunteered as a "beer wench" at the Seafair Beer Garden to raise money for the leukemia and lymphoma society. I had never served beer my entire life - not even in at my college fraternity - so I was very excited. I had so much fun and I loved the fact that I learned how to pour beer from a tap FOR CHARITY. How awesome is that? And based on the "freshman beer" pictured below, I clearly needed this lesson:

Recently it was "Pirate Night" at my weekly sail race. It was a beautiful night and pretty entertaining. No pictures of me as a pirate. No need to have photographic evidence of being a pretty pathetic pirate.

As some of you may have heard, last week was a very hot week in Seattle. In an effort to find some relief from my un-ACed apartment, I went to one of the many city beaches. Having never been to any of Seattle's beaches, I had no idea what to expect. At this one, anyway, there is no real *beach*. Just stone steps leading to Lake Washington. No sand. Just rocks. I ended up sitting on the steps and letting the water lap me. As you can see, the fact that there isn't a beach per se didn't deter lots of people from coming here. The highlight of my beach experience was when the entire beach cheered a young girl as she drummed up the nerve to jump off the high dive.




This beach goer made me look twice. It would never occur to me to wear makeup while swimming..

It has been a while since i've made a self portrait.

So I have a new "big fancy camera" that has a bit of a learning curve. I also don't have my usual filters that i like to use to help me get my skies right. As a result, these pictures from Mt. Rainier and the wildflowers around it are pretty good. No worries, i'll be up to par soon enough, if not better.

Seattle's biggest "traditional" parade (i.e. not one of those where there are naked bicyclists) is the Torchlight Parade, which was this weekend. This parade has all the regular stuff - bands, floats, balloons - what makes it unusual is that it starts just before dusk and continues well after it gets dark. Even though the idea is to have the participants "torch lit" and most didn't really understand that, I still loved the parade. It was so distinctly Seattle - complete with a little rain.





The most Seattle aspect of the parade was the finishers of the parade. Here, we end our parade with pirates. Complete with real canons that they fire (no balls, just blast). It totally feels like they are coming to pillage the city. I wish I had photos of them, but by the time they made it through to where I was watching from, it was totally dark. Grrrr.... argh!

Everybody knows that Seattle has a Space Needle. Not everybody knows that Seattle also has a monorail. This is known for being totally touristy and relatively useless to the locals. Hence why I had not taken it thus far. Now having taken it twice, I can verify that it is indeed very touristy, but still somewhat cool.

Seattle has a salmon ladder, which helps spawning salmon get from the ocean to where they need to go to make babies. This ladder has a viewing room where you can see the salmon doing their level best to make it up the ladder. I had never been there when there were actually salmon running. Not to say that ladder was teeming with fish, but there were a few, so this was a first for me.




Around the fish ladder there are some pretty sculptures and gardens which I really had never paid that close attention to before:

Aaaaaaannnnnnnddd we are back. Thank you for your patience. For those of you who were getting antsy... i am flattered, but there is no need to apply pressure. I only *just* got my camera replaced last week - which was the earliest possible it could have been. I'm not even fully replaced yet.

So in honor of being fully functional for the first time in a month, I did a lot of Seattle things this weekend that were totally new to me. Nice.

This weekend was the Seafood Festival, which I thought was going to be all about seafood. Not really. I mean, there *was* seafood there, but I thought there was going to be endless varieties to sample that you might not otherwise have a chance to. Instead, it was a large street fair with a couple of extras thrown in. Like a climbing wall. In the middle of the street.



A huge salmon throwing up children:



A latino Elvis wearing not one, but TWO different vinyl jumpsuits. I was very impressed that in 90 degree heat, he was able to change suits in under 2 mins. I mean, it takes me longer than that to sometimes remove a wet swimsuit....




Oh, and would you look at who was watching latino Elvis... and no, she was NOT part of the act.



And how can we have a fair in Seattle without this guy... you remember him.. from Folklife over Memorial Day Weekend..

Ok, so this is a pretty difficult post to write, but since so many of you are loyal and regular readers and expect frequent posts, I feel like I have to explain why there may not be many posts for a while. And I don't know how long that "while" is going to be.

This weekend, my cameras (yes, that is plural) and my laptop were stolen out of the trunk of my car. The details of this theft are not really exciting, but crux of it is, whoever did it was a professional and got very very lucky.

So I don't have a method to take pictures or a way to store them. The worst of it is all of the photos that I've taken, including those I've shared with you are gone. I will be honest when I say that my spirit has been crushed by this and it will take a while to recover that as well as my equipment.

I will keep you posted as best I can and hopefully I'll be up and running eventually. Sorry for the very down post, but I think it is only fair to let my "fans" know why the blog will be slow. Thanks for your support - if it weren't for you, I wouldn't have the blog at all and i would really have nothing to show for the past two years.

This weekend I went on an overnight sail to Poulsbo, WA, which is on the Kitsap Peninsula, west of Seattle, on the other side of Puget Sound. I went with three other girls. The goal here was to have some sailing practice without having to rely upon "male assistance," which was accomplished. I think I can pretty much tack like a pro now and I even drove the boat for a while. There was some fun "girl time" as well, of course. Involving lots of great food, wine and stories. And a little silliness. On of the girls brought finger puppets, to which I took an instant liking. Please note how the giraffe looks high and the panda is clearly seasick.







We were on Cricket, my usual boat. We slept on the boat as well- something I haven't done in over a decade. In the picture below, you can see quarters are pretty tight, but we made it work. I slept on the green bench on the right. We also have a pretty nifty galley, complete with a stove that swings when the boat moves so that the stuff you are cooking doesn't land on the floor.




At Poulsbo, quite coincidentally, there was a Midsummer's Festival. This is apparently something that is very big among the Scandinavian countries. Poulsbo has a very solid Norwegian heritage, so there was a lot going on. Vikings were camping out in the town park, there were dances and almost everybody was in costume. You could almost believe you had just sailed to Norway rather than just across the Sound.

Well, it is sailing season again. Our first race was last week. Here is some video taken by the sponsor of the race. This gives you a good idea of what it is like to sail in the Sound. Our boat is the one with a green cricket on the spinnaker.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erPgS6-eFww

Last week, I went to Les Schwab to get a tire patched. While doing so, I saw a poster advertising something that had my fledgling inner redneck giddy with anticipation. The Demming Logging Show. A LOGGING show...essentially, Lumberjack Olympics. AWESOME. I knew what I was doing on Sunday. Whoo.





I really had no idea what to expect except for lots of sawing and chopping... and it definitely didn't disappoint. In addition to the "logger arena" where all the contests took place, there were venders and logger related exhibits. I really can't think of a better place to bring boys (of any age) to. Even if they got bored of what was happening in the arena (not likely), they can wander around the grounds looking at every truck imaginable. All boys love trucks.




What happens in the "arena" is definitely what most people come for. The contests are very exciting and sometimes downright impressive. I mean, you could just smell the testosterone.






And as the day wore on, shirts got removed. Always a plus in my book.





There was even a charity auction. I know you are dying to know what got auctioned off at a logging show, so i'll show you... Large amounts of FIREWOOD. Some of it chopped up already, some of it... not. I was impressed that people had room for this merchandise on their properties. Average price for this much wood? $900. Trucks not included.




The highlight of the afternoon was the "Hot Saws" competition. The goall here is simple: to cut through a 30 inch log the fastest with a chainsaw. The rules here are also very simple: you can attach ANY engine you like to the saw, but only two peole can hold it while it is being used to cut the log. There wer saws powered by Toyota corollas, snowmobiles, Harley Davidsons... you get the drift. The winning cut clocked in at 1.2 seconds. I'm sorry I don't have video, I didn't have the best vantage point. But take my word on this, it was as awesome as it sounds.

The final event was a tug of war between the loggers and kids. When I heard that the kids ALWAYS win, I was totally shocked. The oldest kid is maybe 8. You can see from the video, that there is no way that the loggers were letting the kids win.