the goose loves tuesday's ten (times 2.5!) (#16)

Welcome to the biggest Tuesday post yet, folks. Ten times two-point-five (25 for you math-challenged readers) - the same number I turned last Wednesday. That's a whole lot of photos.

 

1. It's fun to see your birthday on everything - receipts, calendars, emails, etc...

2. The best way to start your birthday is with pancakes and good friends. Here's the good friends part.

3. Oh and having your husband there is fun too.

4. Go to Slappy Cakes, where you make your own pancakes, including batter and toppings of your choice. Choose the buttermilk batter, chocolate chips, and bacon bits, for the most delicious combination.

5. The pancakes go on the griddle in the middle of the table!

6. Make an L for Lucia (even though it doesn't come out the right direction when you flip it) and a birthday balloon.

7. Ready, flip!

8. After breakfast, some shopping downtown, and a post office trip to mail some father's day packages, it's time for lunch. A po' boy for me and jambalaya for Billy.

9. After you spent all morning eating, you should spend the afternoon exercising. Driving over the St. John's bridge for a hike is a good idea.

10. Bringing the dog is more fun.

Especially when he's cute and finds a stick to carry all the way back to the car.

11. Now that you've burned off all those breakfast and lunch calories, it's time to fill up again. It's fun to try the local brewery tasting room under the St. John's bridge. The best way to figure out which beer you like is to get one of each. These, Mom, are actually 4 oz each!

12. It's even more fun when the curls your hairdresser made the night before are still kinda there, even after you hiked!

13. I don't advise your husband to try to drink all the tasters at once, though.

14. Then you go home and shower so that you can make your dinner reservation on time. Once you get there, try the Manhattan.

15. If only your curls stayed in after the shower. At least there's a great view of downtown Portland behind you!

16. Bonus points if the color scheme of your restaurant is your favorite color.

17. Order the economically gastronomic entrees on the prie fixe menu - crusted halibut (I think) and seared beef tenderloin (I think).

Trade halfway through with your husband so you each can taste some.

18. Do the same for dessert, and try to get decent pictures, even though it's gotten very dark.

19. To continue the birthday celebration, have a bunch of people over for a Friday night BBQ! Make purple velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting for extra special deliciousness.

20. Pull all your chairs outside so the guests can enjoy the warm (for once!) evening.

Then set off the party poppers that Carolyn brings over!

21. Continue the party the next night with a little bar-hopping on Saturday night. Bonus points for cool bars with awesome outside patios that have swings at tables.

And extra bonus points for bars with skee ball in the basement and funky lighting that messes with your photos.

22. Then walk down to Fire on the Mountain for delicious wings and other assorted fried foods.

23. Order boneless "wings" (chicken tenders), because they're way better than the ones with bones.

And also enjoy a mountain of tater tots.

24. Laugh at the boys for getting messy and barely making it through their super-spicy bone-ful wings.

25. Finish off the night at a local brewery/tap spot, with outdoor tables and a great view of Portland's Naked Bike Ride.

You get a picture of the beer, but I'll save your eyes from a picture of the naked bums. Nobody wants to see that much skin and fat propped up on bikes.

26. Job well done on birthday festivities, until next year! Thank you, dear friends and family, for celebrating with me! Here's to another three sets of 25 years, at least!

the goose loves tuesday's ten (#9)

Friends!

Can you believe it's Tuesday already?! These weeks have been flying by. I also apologize for giving you nothing each week but a pretty awesome weekly Tuesday post. I'm going to work on forcing myself into other "themed" weekly posts (on different days) so that you get more stuff to read. Because you definitely just sit here waiting for another post all week - what else would you do?

Sunny weekends have turned into a recent trend around here, and I'm 100% A-O-K with that. Except that still only getting two days of sun for every 5+ days of rain is still not enough. Or it's still enough for us Vitamin-D-deprived Portlanders to go crazy at the sight of sun. It's really a problem, though - we see the sun and we force ourselves outside. Or we feel guilty for being inside. Or I we get very overwhelmed about wanting to do everything within one weekend to enjoy the sun, and only having 48 hours (or less, really, because I do sleep) to do it all. Sunshine can be quite the burden! I'm working on letting go and just doing what I can.

 1. On Saturday, I took Bentley to the dogpark to

a) work towards Goal #17 and

b) meet 50 other beagles.

Okay well we didn't actually meet 50, but probably close to 20! The Portland Beagle Meet-Up Group met at our regular dogpark at noon on Saturday, so we figured it'd be a good time to meet a bunch of other crazy cute Bentley-types. We showed up closer to 1pm though, so we probably missed the full crowd. We saw a ton of beagles, but Bentley is still the cutest. And doesn't have the worst bark. Look at that happy puppy face. He loves sunshine too. See all that dirt on his tongue?

He also found a cow weimaraner to graze with. We love those dogs - maybe we'll get a weimaraner brother or sister for Bentley one day....  

Oh and that spot smelled really good, so he had to roll his whole body in it. Several times. For several minutes each. 

 2. We took advantage of the sun and hung our laundry outside. We fit a whole load (minus socks and undies) on this little clotheshorse and our main line. 

We were just finishing hanging the last shirt on the line, which is tied between the fence (as shown) and our back door lamp-thing, when the lamp popped out of the side of the house. Everything stayed intact within itself, but is only connected to the house by a dangling wire now. Oops. (I'm pretty sure the landlords don't read my blog... for good reason...). So we screwed a 5" screw into the house, and now the line hangs on that. For now. 

(P.S. Mom - I taught Billy some awesome clothes-hanging techniques that I learned from being your slave helping you hang clothes for all those years... like how to be economical with your line space and your clothespins. He suggested I write a manual. I think I'll leave that to you, though.) 

3. I love my boys. But they take some weird pictures. And only sometimes do I suggest the poses. 

This one is called "Best Friends - 8th Grade Photo-Shoot Style" (back to back). 

 4. On a Friday night, the last thing Billy and I want to do is cook. But going out isn't always friendly on our strict-paying-down-the-loans-like-crazy budget. So this past Friday we found a happy middle ground. We walked to New Seasons, picked out crab bites, fresh pasta, lemon-artichoke sauce, and beer, and walked out for under $20. (Would have been cheaper if Billy wasn't a fancy-beer-snob).

  The only way we could have done dinner this cheap at a restaurant is without alcohol (or with PBR), and even then it would have been tight. And these things took about 10 minutes to whip up, so easy on the cooking and cleaning. Eating leftover bean soup probably would have been cheaper, but this rocked. 

The final product: 

5. On Saturday morning, I did feel like cooking. I whipped up the blueberry streusel muffins from the super awesome cookbook Peas and Thank You.

 Yes, it certainly does say meatless on there. And there certainly are a bunch of vegetarian and vegan recipes. And we are neither. But all of the recipes are delicious (I'm actually guessing here, I haven't made my way through it all) and it's by a (local!) blogger named Sarah. Check the blog out.

 

Mmmmm. These barely made it to Sunday morning. 

 6. Billy and I went to the dentist on Monday morning. Yeah, as if Mondays weren't bad enough, we decided to torture ourselves with the dentist as well. More like the dentist doing the torturing... I mean look at all of those evil pain-inducing tools. Unfortunately we didn't come out cavity free. Billy had 2, and I had, well, more than 2. The good news? I still have wisdom teeth! Nope, that's actually not good news either. The dentist will make plenty of money off us this year.

7. Back to the sunny weekend. Bentley had fun playing with his reflection and sitting on the been-up-for-nine-months-and-they-still-aren't-hemmed curtains.

8. Here's a good teaser for you! We think that it's finally done snowing in Portland, so we're slowly sashaying into gardening season. How can we call ourselves true Portlanders if we don't grow our own Italian parsley and jalapenos and stuff? So we pulled out the lumber we bought a few weeks ago and started construction. And yes, somebody needs a pedicure. Real bad. 

 9. After spending all remaining sunlight hours building, we whipped up some chicken salad for dinner out of the Cooks Illustrated magazine. Classic and simple, but super tasty. And leftovers. Yay! 

 10. But of all my ten ramblings, this one is the best!

Happy Birthday Jackie!!

Hope 25 is the best year yet, and here's to 75+ more!!

Til next week, or until Friday's Four. Or Saturday's Seven. Or some other clever weekly post title I come up with to get me to blog more...