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.