The Wedding - Mostly Pictures.

 

Getting Ready

Alyssa works at the Long Marine Lab, and it has the the Seymour Center,  dedicated to offering marine science and ocean conservation education to the public. So Alyssa got married at work, in a way. Dave and I had to be there at 3:30 for photos . Once the photos were taken we stood around drinking kava until it was time to get started. We brought a fleece blanket and a quilt for Bubby so she could be wrapped up and warm. Jen was fortunate to get the telescope for an extreme close-up of the event.

Then it was the wedding! Tim and Alyssa had written short speeches which were very sweet and touching and the wedding was beautiful. No rain! I look concerned in the photo because I'm worried about falling off of my shoes. Inside I am beaming!

After the ceremony we had some family photos taken, then there was touring the discovery center and the touch pools and learning that jellyfish’s mouths are also their butts and and watching the fat innkeeper worms in their u-shaped homes and also more kava and David Hill wine.

Dinner was buffet style and we had a table to ourselves. We got lots of good pictures of each other and ate the yummy food. I did have to laugh that there was chimichurri – what the boys used to call “yum sauce” to have with the tri-tip. Tim’s best man Rhys made a touching toast, and Alyssa’s sister Cara as well. Tim’s groomsmen were all former swim teammates, and they all looked so happy for Tim. He had some tough times in college and I imagine it was hard for these guys to see him go through it, so I think that made the wedding even more joyful. Tim and Alyssa both looked radiant throughout.

After dinner there was dancing, and since my best dance partner Jen was there we danced the night away. Josh took Bubby home when she was ready to go. We’d agreed to take all the leftover food and decorations, so we had to stay until the end. Tim and Alyssa left under an arch of friends holding candles in a heavy mist, with lots of love and cheering. Josh and Dave worked with the wedding coordinator to get everything loaded up – it turned out to pretty much fill the back of the navigator. Our original plan had been to take it all back to the house and drop it off at Tim and Alyssa’s in the morning, but we had a lot of stuff already and it would not all have fit. Rather than try to make it work by putting some in everyone’s cars, we just made a trip out to their place and dropped it off. It made for a later night but gave us some quiet time to kvell together.

Saturdays are relaxing, Sundays are not

This morning I got the wordle in two! The down side is that this may have catapulted me solidly out of last place in my wordle group, meaning I’ll need to pay for next month’s competition.

We were up late last night and up early this morning – vacation is too much fun to waste in sleeping! Dave and I went for a short walk down to Haystack Rock and saw a wonderful rainbow. Other than that it was heavy duty relaxing all morning – blogging and knitting for me and a fire in the fireplace and working on the puzzle. The puzzle is challenging!

At 11 Dave and Josh and Jen headed up to Ft George in Astoria for lunch. I had decided I wanted some time to walk around Cannon Beach, so I didn’t go. My original plan was to have a crepe at the Creperie, but it turns out they are closed for the season. I ended up having tortilla soup at Kiki’s tacos (in the space which was Heather’s of sainted memory) and it was delicious. I have a good time wandering through the shops – town was more crowded than yesterday, but still not nearly as busy as it should have been. There’s a new shop where the discovery store used to be, with art supplies and art activities, mostly aimed at children and it looks very fun.

I got home about half an hour before the Astoria folks, who’d had a good time and good food. Our afternoon was much like the morning with the addition of napping. Dave tried to get a walk in before the rains returned and was not successful with his timing.

We had a delicious dinner at Newman’s, which is no longer run by chef John Newman (he died in a car accident in July). The menu hasn’t changed in 10 years or more, but all the food was delicious. A family came in with two boys and sat at the same table we sat at the first time we came with our boys, bringing back fond memories for everyone. Dave and I walked home. Last year at the Crab Shack (AKA Capt Kellogg) in the constant rain it seemed like the house wasn’t convenient to anything; this year with the better weather this location has been perfect.

After dinner we put the great Albert Finney Scrooge movie on for watching while we tried to finish the puzzle. The movie is good. We shall see about the puzzle…

Sunday

We finished the puzzle at about 10:30 after an all hands on deck, all out effort. A special shout out to Jen who did the grunt work of taking every one of the black pieces and trying them in every possible location. We needed a hint to figure out the mystery, although we would have gotten it if we’d not just wanted to go to bed.

We needed to go to bed so we could get up early for more eating – our new tradition of a farewell Pig’n on departure day. We pulled in as they were flipping the open sig and had a quick and delicious breakfast. All of us ate more than we thought we would.

Josh and Jen were packed up before Pig’n, and it didn’t take long for us to get ready to go – we were on the road by 8:30. We would have hung out with the view for longer, but we had matinee tickets that we just couldn’t bear to miss – Bugs Bunny at the Symphony!

On the way home we took advantage of our home automation to start the house heating up. We were startled and dismayed to walk into a cold house. Apparently the blower motor on the furnace went out, and the repair people can’t come until Monday. We have set up many heaters and started a fire in the fireplace, and I am looking forward to sleeping cold tonight.

Rainy, but still the same wonderful view. 
Thanks for being awesome, Sea Forever!

Gray Friday

 

Woke up to the pomised rain, and went upstairs where Dave had made a fire and a pot of decaf coffee. He ground it himself using the machine at the Mariner market and has been enjoying the fruits (beans?) of his labor very much. What I am enjoying very much is the view out the windows, which I don’t think I could ever get tired of.

Since it was raining we had a house morning, which was lovely. I spent some time getting the blog caught up and knitting and I can’t remember what else, the fire was lovely and there was so much view even though it was raining. I was so stuffed from dinner and pie that I had no interest in breakfast at all, a very rare occurrence. I’m writing this blog on Saturday morning, and I can feel a morning of not much happening coming on again.

We trooped out into the rain at 10:45 or so for our second annual Black Friday “make room for pie” family yoga with Christen. We did an hour of mostly twists in the lumbar area, and it was terrific, but not long enough. Not only did I feel a stuck spot in my low back release, but by the end of it I was ready for pie!

Well, Bill’s, actually. Even though it was a little after noon we were able to get a booth on the kid’s side, and had a yummy Bill’s lunch. I had the spinach salad with blue cheese dressing and shrimp, and it needed pickled onions but was otherwise an excellent choice. They were still dangerously low on beer.

It was still steadily raining after lunch, so we headed back for more house time. At some point someone had given Dave a mystery puzzle called “Foul Play and Cabernet”, a 1,000 piece puzzle with a story booklet and clues hidden in the puzzle. We gamely started working on it, but there’s no picture included and a lot of the pieces look alike. Jen is very good at puzzles and has done the bulk of the work. The rest of us drop in for short times and put a couple of pieces together to support her. As far as I know I’m the only one who has cheated by looking up the photo on google.  Not long after we got back from lunch it began to clear up, so we went down to the beach to check out the King tide. We missed the peak, which is too bad because you could see from the that at least one big wave had made it all the way to the base of the dunes. We’ll try again today.

We had an early dinner at Pelican, at about 5:30, and it was not crowded. Usually Cannon Beach does a big shop local advertising push (with mimosas on Friday morning in many of the stores) and according to AAA it’s one of the two big Thanksgiving destinations in Oregon (Bend being the other). This weekend has been the least crowded I’ve seen Cannon Beach in years. It’s both a little worrying and very nice. We got a good amount of food at Pelican and had time to go back to the house before heading out again to the Coaster.

Thanks to Facebook I know that we saw Scrooge at the Coaster 10 years ago. It was Tim’s first time there and he has never returned. Josh had never been until tonight, and I think it’s funny that they both saw Scrooge as their first production. It was a perfect Coaster performance. They seem to have added at least one song and cherrypicked a few favorite lines from other versions, and of course you have to leave out some bits and adapt others, but overall a very good rendition. The ghosts of Christmas present and future were particularly noteworthy. Present was played by Cyndi Fisher with great verve and gusto and an enthusiastic mostly Scottish accent. We’ll be saying “Touch me robe” when it’s time to go from now on. Future was played by an uncredited actor and really can’t be described, but had bony skeletal fingers and made appropriate scary noises when it nodded. Josh and Jen celebrated the return of the Coaster Cookie by having one each.  

Fortunately no scary demons came through the audience so no-one was traumatized, and in fact we were all in a very good mood when we got home. Dave and I made up for our lack of cookies with some pie (the pecan pie didn’t get any better, sadly) and we had a fire and watched Garfield thanksgiving and worked on the puzzle and read and knitted. We all stayed up too late (it was after midnight when Jen and I called it a night) and it was wonderful.

Last year it rained and stormed the whole time we were here and it was a drag. The rainy morning we had today was just perfect.

Thanksgiving at Sea Forever

Woke up and went upstairs to see the beginning of another gorgeous day. Dave went for a short walk out to the beach and we discovered another benefit of this house – from upstairs you can only see the top of the dune and the ocean, so it feels very secluded (especially with the empty lot next door) even though it’s right on the street that everybody walks on. Dave went down to the beach and said it was full of people, all invisible from the house.

We had a quiet day that somehow felt busy, maybe because it had many small and necessary but unexceptional activities. I did a lot of blogging and knitting, and we took quite a few short walks. Before lunch Dave and I walked into town and got a bag of salad at the Mariner market (get two) and on the way back discovered that Ocean Road doesn’t go all the way through between downtown and midtown – 2 blocks north of here it is blocked by giant boulders and there is only a footpath. Jen made the traditional stromboli, which was delicious as usual but needed hot sauce or mama lil’s mixed in with the roasted peppers.

My childhood friend Page and her cousin were on a road trip up the coast, so we took a short walk with them down to the beach to see the King Tide, which was disappointing to say the least. I had visions of waves coming up to the base of the dunes, or coming up the ramp by the Wayfarer. The Surfsand Resort clearly had the same visions, and had boarded up the windows on the lower floor. The tide was high, yes, but didn’t seem all that kingly to me.

One thing that didn’t disappoint was the weather, which was mild and sunny. Once Dave had gotten the turkey in he and I went for a walk to the north, around Necus’ Park and through town. It’s always fun and a little strange to walk through town on Thanksgiving and have the sidewalks empty. When we were here at the end of August they were building a new standalone shop across from the gas station at the north end of town; I am unenthusiastically reporting that it is a weed store. On the plus side, the one in the building with Mi Corazon has closed, so we will check out what has replaced it later.

Jen and Josh and I played some Tenzi while Dave had his last relaxing-before-cooking time. I am not good at Tenzi and like to tell myself it’s because I’m twice as old as Josh and Jen, so I like that Dave wasn’t playing because if he was good at it my story wouldn’t hold up. Jen also has a pack cards of alternate ways to play and I did much better at that.

Then it was full on cooking mode until dinner for Dave and Josh and Jen. I helped when called on but was mostly working on socks – I finished the ribbing and got through turning the heel before dinner. Dinner was delicious as always, and we had fun talking about Thanksgiving food traditions, which we don’t have a lot of. In there are only two - grandma salad, a salad of apple, banana, mini marshmallows and just a tiny bit of mayonnaise that apparently originally came from Dave’s first grandmother Sandage but which is now attached to his mama and of which Josh is the official arbiter of the recipe – and homemade cranberry sauce, which is notable because while it is homemade it doesn’t contain any offensive flavorings such as orange peel, cinnamon, or raisins. We had a 13.5 lb turkey which is plenty for 4 people and/but doesn’t make a lot of leftovers. I will leave it to the reader to decide which of those conjunctions is correct.

After dinner and cleanup we were stuffed. Dave, Josh and I went for a walk over to see if the EVOO people were still eating (they weren’t), and Josh headed back to the house while Dave and I went for a short walk on the beach. The tides aren’t just unusually high, they’re also unusually low in the evenings. It’s nothing like the great minus tides of summer, but they are special. We walked way out but it’s very close to full moon and it was pretty dark out there, so we didn’t walk all the way down to haystack.

When we got back we did some prep work for tomorrow’s trip to the Coaster Theater by watching the 1970 Albert Finney version of a Christmas Carol. It is called Scrooge, music and book by Leslie Bricusse, and it may be Dave’s favorite version. I don’t want to give away what makes it so special, but Sir Alec Guinness channeling Jack Sparrow as Marley’s ghost is memorable, to say the least. And yes, I do know that Jack Sparrow is after 1970, but the spirits can do anything they want.

We had dessert during the movie, and I was disappointed in the pecan pie I made – while it was certainly pecan-y enough (maybe even too pecan-y, if possible) I had deliberately made the crust thicker on the top which I don’t think I like, but mostly I did not like the custardy part – it was either underbaked or just wrong, and it wasn’t rich enough. Is buttery a thing? I will have to try again.

By the end of the movie it was certainly bedtime. The beds here are very comfortable which is a good thing when you’ve eaten as much as we had. Also the downstairs is much cooler than the upstairs where the thermostat is, making for excellent sleeping.

The Wedding: Before and After, but not During.

Walking to the Pourhouse

Wedding Day –Jen took one for the team and was my Pilates student for my final teaching assignment, and she even said she enjoyed it. Dave and I went for a walk and it was actually partly sunny, but it was getting cloudier all the time. We all went for lunch at the Parrish Publick House, which turned out to be very yummy. Jen ordered Fried Artichokes as an appetizer and they were delicious. We loved our house so much we’re thinking of renting it for next Thanksgiving, and if we do you can be sure we’ll be eating there – and calling it the Parrish Pour House.

Can you believe it’s still the wedding day and we’ve already done so much? Joan and the girls arrived around 2 and it was great to see them and hear Bubby read her book, The Buffalo in the Bed, to them. Alyssa has many college-age volunteers and interns at her job, and had found a sitter (two, really, since the first one got sick and had to cancel at the last minute) for the girls.

Sunday I had made breakfast reservations at the Heavenly Roadside Café in Scott’s Valley. It turned out not to be the place I meant to go, which was Humble Sea in Felton, but the food was OK and we had one last meal together before heading out – Joan, Ira, Bubby and the girls to San Francisco; Josh and Jen to Medford, and Dave and I went south for some wine tasting in Paso Robles. Everyone agreed that even though their weddings and wives are different, they are all terrific. Both my boys had made excellent choices. I’m a lucky mother!

The day before Thanksgiving

 

A quiet couple of weeks between The Wedding and now, with one big milestone – I taught my first private, for-pay pilates lesson to Elizabeth yesterday. A big deal for me!

Dave got a message from the property manager that we could check in as early as noon, so we headed out a little before 11 and had Bill’s for lunch (where they had one fewer beer on tap than usual – “They’re drinking us dry” said the server). Dave had Google mapped the house and knew which cross street to take, and the house is right next to where we were last year. So we pulled up and there is no Captain Kellog next door, just an empty lot. The power of belief is so strong – we were told when we tried to rent Captain Kellogg that it was “undergoing some major renovations”. So we figured that we must have been wrong about the house being next door – we checked the house number and everything before going in.

I’ve been a little worried about the house, because while the pictures on the website look nice it’s not very nice looking from outside – you can see into two of the bedrooms and they’re both small, and one looks very bare with many beds crammed in. And in fact the bedrooms are kind of small, although the master is good sized. Here’s what though: the kitchen and living room are on the second floor in a big open plan area with giant windows and it’s fantastic. There’s a dune between here and the beach so you can’t really see the ocean from the ground floor – that was the drawback to Capt Kellogg – but up here it looks like you could just walk out the balcony door and be on the beach. It’s lovely. The balcony door was very useful when a giant Herd of Helk (the second H is silent) walked down the road that runs between the house and the dune.

We had many cancellations, so it’s a big house with a lot of bedrooms (and THREE bathrooms) with just us and Josh and Jen, who didn’t get here until after 6. Dave and I unpacked, then headed out to the Fresh Market for fresh things (milk, firewood, etc) then had some down time (I worked on the blogs from the wedding). In the late afternoon we decided to go for a walk, so we headed towards the beach (directions to the beach are included in the instructions for the house: go out the front door and keep going). We stopped for a moment to look for Capt Kellogg and suddenly it hit me: the empty lot with the foundation in it next door *IS* Captain Kellogg. It’s not undergoing renovations, it’s been demolished and they’re building something new there. I can’t explain how it felt, like everything shifted. I was so sure it was being renovated that it couldn’t get through that the foundation was where the house used to be. During our walk we recited the Litany of Change: Midtown, Heather’s, Calypso, 7C’s, Irish Table…

Our walk turned into a 5+ mile walk to the Rock Wahii. The sand is crazy low, lower than I’ve ever seen it – the lettuce garden that’s sometimes in front of it is now a boulder scramble, which we decided not to do as sunset was approaching. We ended up walking back mostly after sunset, and the sky kept turning more and more amazing colors. When we got back to the house it was still gorgeous. We were stopped by a woman from Virginia Beach who was here with her sister-in-law who had heard about the King Tides Thu-Sat and was telling her she couldn’t go on the beach at all, so we explained what they were and she was much relieved.

More downtime. I started knitting some socks. Josh and Jen arrived just in time to head out to the Bistro forour 7:15 dinner, where they greeted us like old friends. It was locals sing-along in the front room, and we got our big table and had yummy food and especially drinks. They have a full bar but no cocktail menu, so I was going to have a daiquiri but apparently the fullness of the bar doesn’t include a blender. I was at a loss when Josh and Jen recommended a Bee’s Knees. The server went away and some time later I heard the bartender working the shaker and then say “It’s a bees knees”. When it came out, the server said they’d had to look it up on the internet, and then said, “this is a special local dark honey”. It was a bee’s knees, with an amazing blob of the yummiest honey ever, which I stirred around and ate and it was fantastic. I had a second one, and Jen ordered one also, and each time there was the sound of the shaker and the bartender saying, “It’s a bees knees”. It was the bees knees indeed.

After dinner we came right home – with a quick stop for giant Helk in the road – and watched Bottle Shock on Netflix (no laptop needed!) and then it was well past our bedtimes. I finished half the ribbing on the socks.