the goose loves tuesday's ten (#17)

We spent one whole half of one whole day in the car this weekend, driving to Spokane for my cousin's wedding. It was a grand family affair, and reuniting with all the close and extended family members was awesome. Having a few drinks didn't hurt either. Here's my ten favorite moments/photos of the weekend.

1. We drove my parents and brother from Portland to Spokane (about 6 hours) on Friday, just in time to shower and change for the rehearsal dinner. Here's Billy and Liam, post-dinner, enjoying beers at the Blue Spark, one of the only bar open past 10pm. [Fun fact: from their website, I learned their motto is "no crap on tap."] Good beer, but weird dance/music/stage/white trash vibe.

2. We rented bikes from the hotel Saturday morning (yay for winning the one with the unadjustable-and-way-too-low bike seat!) and rode the mile to the wedding reception site to check it out. The groom requested a "water feature" for the ceremony so they were wed in front of a waterfall.

3. After a cloudy morning, the fog burned off San Francisco-style and the sun came out for the afternoon ceremony. Here's the wedding party (and officiant) all lined up!

Adorable flower girls.

4. And the bride! My cousin Alison, escorted by Uncle Jim. So gorgeous.

And the photographer, about to fall into the pond.

5. Here's the Spokane Dempseys. Uncle Jim is my dad's brother, so they have the same last name as us; when they moved to Spokane years ago, we were differentiated by our cities. Allison's three sisters and one brother were the majority of the wedding party, and they were adorable!

6. Allison married Timmy / Jian Liu, who she met in China when she studied and taught English there, so the reception was decorated with chinese lanterns and symbols. Love the red!

And the first dance...

7. The reception room had this great balcony overlooking some area of Spokane (generally just grass) but it was great for some sun and fresh air. We took the opportunity to update some family photos.

 I should probably lighten these up...

Family of 6!

8. The former bride and groom, happy to make way for the newest married couple in the family!

9. Lucy power! The cutest little flower girl, my cousins' cousin on the other side, was also named Lucy.

10.  We left my parents in Seattle with Monika, and drove back to Portland with Liam. We had rented a car to avoid car trouble in our somewhat-unreliable Expolorer, only to encounter an awful screeching noise from the back right tire, about an hour outside of Pasco.

Twenty minutes later, the Enterprise in Pasco switched us out for this hot ride. Catastrophe averted, and Liam got to the airport with plenty of time to spare.

the goose loves st. paddy's, even late

Happy St. Paddy's Day, Friends!

Yes, I'm not dumb. I know I'm an entire week behind. But bear with me. A few weeks ago, I arranged a collection of our green/Irish/Scottish/shamrock things on our two floating shelves, above the kitchen table. These shelves had Christmas stuff awhile ago, then were empty, and will have other stuff in the future, but for awhile, we're going with green.

But there's several reasons why this is okay:

a) green is good for all of March, especially in hippie-ville Portland

b) we're an Irish/Scottish family, so we could keep this stuff up year round if we wanted

c) it snowed on Thursday, and it's supposed to snow on Monday, so it's not going to be spring here anytime soon, so there's no point in replacing it with "springy" decor

d) it'll probably be June by the time I get around to changing it up again anyway.

I love this display because almost all of these pieces have a special meaning or story or origin.

I'll zoom in, so you can see our treasures close up. The large shamrock plate is from my aunt and uncle - Jim and Pat Dempsey of the "Spokane" Dempseys. They gifted us this plate when Billy and I got engaged, and we loved their early display of support and the truly thoughtful gift. 

I made the whisky tasting frame of Billy and three of his groomsmen back in 2009, after they attended an event in CA following Billy's mom's memorial service. Such good buddies.

The (empty) bottle of Balvenie (that's whisky, for you PBR-lovers) and the quiach cup (the little silver thing with handles) are from our wedding - Billy and the boys (dads included, right?) enjoyed the "wedding whisky" in celebration, and we used the quaich cup tradition as part of our celtic-themed rehearsal dinner.

The little white dish was a wedding gift from the Shaugnessys (Pat Dempsey's mom & dad), an Irish family themselves, and has an Irish blessing on top.

Then, to the right: the four-photo frame was displayed at our rehearsal dinner, and includes photos from when Billy and his parents traveled to Scotland in 2005. 

The glass vase with the stones and the candle was lit as a memorial to Billy's mom Barbara, also used at our rehearsal dinner.

The tartan is a sash that Billy's aunts presented to me at the wedding, another Scottish tradition. They pinned it using the little silver sword pin (in the above photo).

The center frame was purchased at HomeGoods, and the print inside was printed from Pinterest. Probably the least-meaninful piece, but I like how it brings everything together.

On the top shelf - a photo of Billy and his parents, which we displayed at the rehearsal dinner. The green pieces of paper are bookmarks that we gave as rehearsal dinner favors, and have a celtic blessing on them.

The candle has the claddagh image and a prayer, and was a Christmas gift from Barbara many years ago, now. We used it at the wedding - Bill lit the candle before the main procession at the beginning, and it stayed lit throughout the ceremony.

Finally, the last "quadrant" includes a photo of Billy from Scotland, and a purple-wood cross my parents gave us for our wedding.

The white frame has another printable found on Pinterest, and the green vase was made by Jackie awhile ago at our house. She hadn't taken it home yet, so I incorporated it into my display!

The black frame has an Irish blessing and photo from our wedding RSVPs - our friend Allison put it together as a gift for our rehearsal dinner, and we love it.

In the back is a mirror from Goodwill that I refinished and spraypainted. It's kinda hidden, but I think the shape and color goes well with the display.

But I couldn't just bore you with all of our special mementos for an entire post, right? Well I could, but I won't. Let's move on to more fun things.

Remember this tutu?

Well after I finished making it, but before I wore it to the race, I let Bentley take a spin with it.

More like I forced him. Can you see the pain in his eyes? I can't, but Billy says it's written all over his face.

 Wouldn't he make the cutest little Ballerina Beagle Bentley?

 This one says, "Hey Mom, let's dance."

Or maybe, "Ugh Mom, you better not show this to any of my friends."

Does that count the internet and all his friends who read this blog? Oops!

Maybe I have to make him a super-dog cape now, just to make up for his embarrassment over these....

the goose loves canada - day 3

Alas, we've come to our final day in the beautiful city of Vancouver, BC.

(You can scroll down past this post to see Days 1 & 2, or just click here:

Canada - Day 1! & Canada - Day 2!)

Billy and I were driving back to Seattle Monday afternoon, to spend the night at my sister's house and drive back to Portland on Monday, so we were ready to adventure for as long as possible.

We started by meeting Holly, Daryl, Matt, & Ruth (the bride's family, Billy's aunt/uncle/cousins) for breakfast. We walked down to their hotel (about 8 blocks from ours) and I made Billy pose with the massive moose mountie (say that 5 times fast!) in the lobby.

Breakfast was delicious (I must have been too famished to think of taking photos), and then we said our goodbyes to the family. We headed back to our hotel to take some final photos and pack up.



I like this photo - it shows the shadow of our hotel!

Billy had to fly a paper airplane out our 27th-floor window before we left. It went straight down.

After checking out of our hotel, we decided that we would rent bikes for the day and ride around town, do a little more souvenir trolling (we needed some "thank yous" for those back home), and then ride around Stanley Park, which is the large area of trees towards the back of our scenery photo above (the photo with the shadow).


Billy's snazzy getup.




I demanded politely requested the cruiser.

So we rode alongside the waterfront area (like we walked on Day 1) and ended up in Gastown again (yeah, I think that's our favorite spot in Vancouver). We found some gifts for the homefront and were ready for lunch in no time.

Fun sidenote - while walking along the street looking for a good lunch spot, I definitely got asked out by someone. He was asking Billy and I if we knew of a good coffee shop, and then looked directly at me and asked "Would you be interested in getting coffee with me sometime?" After I stared at him blankly for a few seconds, he motioned to Billy and I and said, "Oh, are you two a couple?" We said yes and he quickly vanished. Billy said I should have gone with him, to get a free cup of coffee. Thanks, husband.

After our fun Canadian encounter, we decided to go to a Southern BBQ place for lunch. Yeah, I know. BBQ in Canada? But it was delicious!


Check out my awesome helmet hair.

 Billy ordered a bbq sandwich thing and I ordered a corndog and hush puppies off the appetizer menu.

Billy ordered a beer (duh) with the best name ever - it was an I. P. Eh. Get it? Like an IPA, but the way Canadians say it - "eh"! Those clever people.

After devouring our food with no problem, we hit up one last tourist shop to find the most perfect present for Bentley. He was staying with our dear friend Jackie, but had a somewhat rough weekend. On Sunday morning, he broke out of his crate and promptly found and ate a whole bar of chocolate. And chocolate is poisonous for dogs. So he spent Sunday afternoon at the vet, with an IV and a catheter and stuff. They gave him charcoal to prevent absorption of chocolate, which he inhaled, rather than ingested. So then he was on antibiotics. We were going to get him a little something anyway, but then when we saw this 2 or 3 foot long elephant, we knew that was the perfect present. Yeah, a little big, but he'd love it. However, the store was in Gastown, on the opposide side of the city from our car. Billy said we'd come back to get it on our way out, but that would add a bunch of time. So I told him I'd just bike it back to our car. And I did!

On our way back, we biked through the convention center area, where they have this giant raindrop sculpture thing.

We also passed Canada Place, where they load up cruise ships and stuff. I think it also was part of the Olympics thing or something.

As Portlanders who "love" rain, we were more than enthralled by the statue.

It's so large! And yes, that's Mr. Elephant with me.

We made it back to the car where we deposited our gifts and our large elephant safely. Then we took off for Stanley park, which is a forest-y area on the edge of the city. There's a bike path that goes all the way around it, along the water. The day was a little breezy, but very beautiful.
Before we left, I calculated the mileage (it was in km on the map). But I did my math wrong and at first came up with 15 miles. Luckily, it was only about 6, or we would have been there a long time, at the pace we went!

A nice lady took a picture of us for our Vancouver photo frame.

And look, geese! I didn't just take this because of my love for geese, but because I finally saw Canadian geese where they belong! In Canada! But Billy thinks they're just called geese here, just like french toast in France is just called toast. Right?

Soon enough, we were back around the little peninsula and rode our bikes back to the shop, where our car was parked. We gave back the bikes and headed home.

Luckily, the wait times at the border coming back to the good ole' US of A weren't so bad. We also stopped at the duty free store, where Billy stocked up on a few things (read=liquor).

We stayed the night in Seattle, visited Monika's classroom on Tuesday morning, and then headed home. We were very happy to see our little pup, who was all recovered from his chocolate gorge. And he LOVED his new present!

He's sharing Mr. Elephant with his girlfriend Dakota, Jackie's dog.



Aww what a cutie!

Bentley's now had the elephant for about two weeks, and it no longer has eyes (those went first, actually), tusks, a tail, or a mouth. The tip of the trunk has also been breeched, and it's lost at least half its stuffing. But he loves carrying it around, chewing on it, and rolling around on it. And then when he gets tired, he lays on it! Yesterday, he brought it into the kitchen and sat on it while he watched us make dinner. It was so worth it!

Canada was lots of fun. We'd go back in an instant if we had lots of money and free time.