A & A - CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NEWBORN!!!! 2nd time natural birth, too - YOU'RE A SUPERSTAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm still sick. felt worse today, and barely got through my morning lessons with a huge dose of nausea. i cancelled the afternoon ones, and have been in bed sleeping on and off since. i've had to miss my father in law's retirement celebration tonight as a result. bummer. i guess i'll take a bunch of benadryl tonight and just sleep for as long as possible tonight. is this going to last forever????

still sick. my life consists of sleeping for as long as possible into the mornings when i don't have to get up early and teach, do as little as possible to conserve energy after i do finally get up (although i did manage to go running somehow on monday), teach, and then eat dinner & collapse for the evening. i made it to the library recently and picked up three books, one called "leaving the saints - how i lost the mormons and found my faith". very interesting. all about mormon-hood and problems with the religion.

today is the birthday of two; my little nephew, p, and my friend dr. s. hope you both had a great day! i held my very first group class with my little violin students this morning. i'm still not feeling better, so i've spent the rest of the day trying to sleep & relax. a friend, p, came by and dropped off some homeopathic stuff for me to try: cold-fx. anyone heard of it? it has a lot of ginseng in it. i'll see what happens. most normal cold medicines i can't take, because the primary ingredient makes me jittery & high. i'm stuck suffering through ucky feelings, when most people can just take nyquil & sleep through everything. oh well. hopefully i'll wake up tomorrow feeling magically better. j is away for the weekend, climbing in leavenworth.

happy birthday, jay-c! sorry i can't be there for your birth-fest at lorelei, but i'll be there in spirit. have the Rinder Steak mit Krauterbutter, Pommes Frites und Salat, an Apfelstrudel mit Vanille Sauce, und plenty of erdinger dark. plenty!

i'm up past midnight, waiting for the perfect amount of fatigue before i try to sleep with my still stuffy nose & head cold. i spent the whole first part of the day in bed until i had to start teaching at 3. it was a long haul to 8:45, but i survived. i hope to wake up tomorrow and magically feel better.

happy birthday, a, fiddleknitter extraordinaire! hope you have a great day in golden. :)

i'm up at 4am because i can't sleep. i've caught cold #1 of the season. several of my students have been sick with colds already, and i seem to have caught it. yay.
had a good weekend. j & i spent most of sat cooking for the week, and cooking dinner for a friend who had an operation on his foot. we made apple crisp again, with the rest of the apples from our tree, and a potato-tomato-grueyere-leek dish to go with some bbq skewers. we made jambalaya for the week.
j was out climbing most of today on the east side of mt hood. i meant to get out & do things myself, but felt too rundown to move from the couch. this evening, j & i watched walk the line, the joaquin phoenix/reese witherspoon movie about june carter & johnny cash. good flick, although as i'm not a big country music fan, and especially not a fan of the "musicals" genre, it was a bit slow at times.

i just finished reading the book "mozart in the jungle - sex, drugs, and classical music" by blair tindall. she was an oboist who freelanced in new york city who went back to school later in life (full ride to stanford) to become a journalist. very interesting to read at this mini crossroads in my life. i highly recommend it as a read to any classical musician, especially those musicians who complain a lot about their job(s).

happy birthday, big brother!!! i hope you have time to do something fun today.

j's friend c made us a beautiful wood muddler for making drinks. he also made us the wooden bowl which is in the picture somewhere down below with all the food we made for my dad's birthday. he came over last night & we made mojitos. j & c were muddling away at the mint while i was still teaching in the basement, and i could hear it all, & was getting excited about dinner & mojitos! good times, for sure.

i have pictures from the race on sun, but they're on j's phone, and we haven't downloaded them yet. we will when time permits.

these are my leftovers from montage, a restaurant in se portland. we're running a 10k race tomorrow morning, so we did a fair bit of carb loading with a spicy mac(aroni). the leftovers are gone now. :)

we began the morning by picking up our race packets & stopping at a climbing gear store. we cooked a spicy african pea soup when we got home - food for the week. we watched most of the movie/musical "rent", but i turned it off in the last 15 minutes because i couldn't stand it so much. i can't stand modern musicals. i really tried hard, but i just couldn't watch it. it was the same thing for me with moulin rouge - just couldn't take it seriously.

aren't they cute??? they match the blanket and everything.

isn't it beautiful??? NO, not our kitchen decor. i hate the fake wood panels, as i do the electric stove. i meant the apple crisp we baked last sunday, using apples from our tree in our back yard. we were thinking of removing the tree, but we're going to keep it now that we know the apples are good for baking. the apple crisp didn't last long!

ahhh... the joys of the new schedule. j & i went to a movie tonight at the mission theater. (otherwise i would've been playing a garrison keillor show!) for those of you who don't live in portland, the mission is one of the businesses owned by the mcmenamins. movies are sort of second runs, and it's only $3 admission. they serve food & beer, too. we saw clerks II. for those not easily offended, it's a GREAT movie. if you were fans of the first one, this one is even better - i was pleasantly surprised. if you are easily offended, please don't watch it.
i recently finished a book called "wild swans- three daughters of china" by jung chang. jung depicts the life of chinese during the 20th century, following the life stories of her grandmother, her mother, and herself. i knew very little about the history of china, and this was eye opening. it makes me very thankful for my life and my freedom. i highly recommend reading it, and not all at once. it has taken me since january (when i was sick in bed for a week) to read the whole book. it's pretty depressing, which is perhaps why it's taken me so long to finish. good to spread it out. i'm now reading "blinded by the right - the conscience of an ex-conservative" by david brock, which so far is fairly dull. i've also just begun a biography of eleanor roosevelt. i'm waiting for "mozart in the jungle" to arrive from amazon. it's been over a week! :(
we're not going to tear the tree down after all, and we certainly won't be out $3700. i've had another arborist look at the tree, who said the mushroom things were really created by insects (wasps) and didn't hurt the tree, and my first estimator looked at the tree again today and confirmed that it's healthy. so, little keebler elves, magic cookie creators, no need to worry about losing your home!

Bud, we'll miss you. :(
http://obits.oregonlive.com/Oregon/DeathNotices.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=19068446

friday afternoon, j got his hair cut downtown. i met him there, and we went out for happy hour. our friend u joined us. after we were sufficiently "happy", we dropped in r.e.i. to take in their labor day sale, and then headed out west to dania, a furniture store. this is a couch we finally decided to purchase (after returning sat afternoon). we'll be getting it in a different color with different pillows. we finished off the evening with dinner at a local restaurant, using gift cards we received a long time ago. it was a restaurant with really huge portions, so we enjoyed a second meal sat for lunch!

my dad's birthday was today, and j & i cooked him dinner last night to celebrate. here are some pictures of the table all set up outdoors, and the food waiting inside. we made a spinach salad with olives, romano cheese, & candied walnuts. the main course consisted of scallops with a champagne butter-cream sauce on millet with green beans. j cooked the scallops and did a perfect job!

this is me climbing. we went to broughton's bluff today, in lewis & clark state park. this rock is a lot different from the rock at smith rock - it's dirtier, and rounder, and harder to grip. there are lots of cracks with spiders & spider webs. i didn't like it so much, and didn't go to the top of this very easy climb. i just wasn't enjoying being so far off the ground. :( we left this area and went to another, and i belayed j while he did a few climbs. there was a cute puppy who cheered me up.

cute puppy named casey. the puppy licked us a lot - very friendly!

this is a picture of j climbing.

this afternoon we spent making west african chicken peanut soup, which we found in the moosewood cookbook. the recipe didn't actually include chicken, but we added it figuring it would make it a bit heartier. it turned out really well! we got finished in time to watch a movie - just friends. it was a really predictable romantic comedy, which was ok for a sunday afternoon.

tonight we enjoyed one last soccer game at pge park. the portland timbers were playing the charleston battery. the game ended 0-1. portland hasn't had a very good season this year, and tonight wasn't an exception. still, we all had a great evening. a fun way to celebrate the labor day weekend. the princess (pictured below) tasted cotton candy for the first time, and hated it, so we all got to eat it for her! :)

we had a princess in our presence at the soccer game tonight! :)

just a quick comment... because of the size of all the pictures from the honeymoon, the whole blog for august often doesn't load. the first picture in aug (at the bottom) should be of "world cup portland 2006". if it isn't there, try reloading the page or pressing "august" again, in case you didn't get to see all the pics from italy and wanted to.