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!

Winery Saturday

Saturday we ditched the kids and went winery hopping with Alana, NancyD and her friend Joe. We made an unscheduled stop at Ponzi just down the street - none of them had been there before, which is amazing since it's only two miles away. It's good wine, but pricey, partly because it's so close to Portland.
Robert and Jennifer found us at Elvenglade/Remy picking up our futures, and tasting them now that they're bottled. Susy bought a nice print of the painting they used for their labels, and I had a long chat with their photographer, bagribs, about Flickr.
From there we all headed South to Carlton and stopped at Ken Wright Cellars and drank expensive futures we declined to buy, and then walked over to the Utopia tasting room where it was my turn (I was jealous of Paul's purchase last time) to buy a case of their tasty and reasonably priced Napa Malbec.
We returned home and Susy fed the kids while I (Bad Dad!) let Alana drive me over to have more wine and food at Robert and Jennifer's house, and play Guitar Hero.
I came home in time for us to discover that Netflix sent us the wrong Veronica Mars DVD. And of course that is the one disk that has been unavailable at our local video store.

Elk Cove Fall Dinner

Here's Susy and I at the Elk Cove Winery last night. We went with Paul and Alana for the Fall Roosevelt's Club Dinner. The food was good, the wine was great, and the setting is spectacular.


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Andrew went out for dinner with Rian and her family to PF Chang's. Mali stayed home and hopefully slept - she was really wiped out after the sleepover at Tesia's house.
Before all that, there was another poker game at our house:

Soccer, Juice Joint, Homecoming

Mali Soccer -
Mali's team won 4-0 in McMinnville Saturday, and lost 1-0 at home yesterday. Mali played great, as usual. Actually, she was sort of asleep the first half of the first game, but THEN she played great. There's lots of soccer photos of Mali's team (some of Mali) at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alohaxtreme2/1401943691/
Here's the latest of Mali from MY Flickr stream:


Murder at the Juice Joint - Saturday night we went to the local Wine Styles shop to play a dress-up murder mystery game. Also there were: Robert and Jennifer, Paul and Nancy, and NancyD. Alana won best actress - I swear she never went out of character once. Susy went all out and really looked the part of a flapper girl/actress. I was Detective P.I. Pinkerton. I'll post some photos after I get them off Alana's camera.

Andrew news -
We have learned that Andrew is going to the homecoming dance next month with a cross-country running friend of Tiana's. Rian was over yesterday and somehow the topic came up. Here he is on the phone at Mali's game Sunday morning. Who's he talking to?