Seattle Cask Beer Festival

I am finally feeling fully recovered (near-enough) from my bout with pneumonia. This is good, as I was able to have a great time at Saturday's Washington Cask Beer Festival at Seattle Center with my golf/drinking team and Angie and Zen, our two designated drivers. I witnessed a huge field (auditorium?) of great beer, pouring freely (after admission), all cask-conditioned, which is by far my favorite, regardless of type of Stout, IPA, ESB, Pale Ale, or any other categorization the brewer wants to claim. Surprisingly, not much in the way of food or water/non-alcoholic drinks to keep the imbibers rational and the DDs entertained. John pointed out there were many truly magnificent bellies there, probably some $20,000 ones, considering the quality of beer that went into building them.

Post-fest, we went for food and still more cask-conditioned beer (a large and unneeded pint for me)at Brouwers Cafe in Fremont, where there was random punching, arm-wrestling and general silliness. This was followed with a trip across the street to the Theo Chocolate factory, where they very nicely did not throw us out as we stayed past their closing time, eating their samples and not buying anything.

Poker! First Bus trip! Fly to Canada!

Since we had leftover food and cake from the Mali's party, we invited Rian and her parents (Jason and Terry) over for a poker night. Andrew and Terry were the big winners. It was a great time. Mali played and is getting much better. She took lots of breaks to prepare food for everyone. She made us all cucumber sandwiches that were very tasty. Jason brought a great bottle of wine again: 2002 Sketchbook Cabernet.

Mali wanted to go to the mall with all of her new gift cards. Rian suggested they take the bus. I was all for this idea, since Rian had done it before and the kids had not. I love mass transportation. Andrew refused, and Susy caved into driving them, but they took the bus back from the mall. Without incident. Susy picked them up at the Safeway at the bottom of the hill, since it was raining pretty hard when they returned.
Mali didn't even use her gift cards! They had lunch at the food court, wandered around a bit, and came home.

Today I'm working madly. I get on a plane at 4:30 to go to Canada. I'm meeting Brian tonight near Vancouver, and tomorrow we're going in to BCTC's new control center to train folks on one of the products I work on.

Less than a week until we hit the sunny Caribbean! Woohoo!