Silas the brother is the gray one and Zoe the sister is the black one. They love playing and wrestling together, and sleeping together too. They're both lap cats...Silas was sitting on my lap while I was working on my computer, and then he decided to stretch out:
They are just so tiny and so stinkin' cute! Easy to pick up with one hand too, and both of them don't mind being held.
Also this weekend, I went to the Mariners' game with my friend Alana. They aren't doing too well this season, but we love going to games plus it was fleece-blanket giveaway night! Here's us visiting the Moose (by the way, one of my co-workers is the Mariner Moose's girlfriend :)
On Sunday we took a hike near Mt. Rainier to Mowich Lake. It started off well for all of us, but then I got stung by a bee on my leg. That hasn't happened in forever! I'm kind of sensitive to bug bites, so it swelled up and hurt pretty bad, so my mom and I turned back to go to the first aid kit in the car while Dad, Mike, Holly, and Dustin went on. When we met up again later, both Holly and Mike had gotten stung too! Not quite sure why bees were out since it was fairly cold and rainy, but what luck for all three of us. Here's me crossing a creek with my bee sting:
So two weekends ago I went to the wedding of my friends Kara and Brandon. I met them through Lutheran Volunteer Corps, and now they live in Seattle. They got married on Kara's family farm in Carnation, a small town about a half hour east of us, out in the countryside by the Snoqualmie River.
They had the ceremony under a large oak tree (which provided shade!), with all the colorful flowers from a neighboring flower farm. They put them in old-fashioned mason jars:
After the ceremony, we each carried our folding chair over to the tables under the big tent. While the wedding party took pictures, we could walk around the farm, drink lavender lemonade and sun tea, or pick blackberries from the bushes growing along the perimeter. My friend Juliana (whom I also met in Chicago from Lutheran Volunteer Corps) flew out from Washington, DC to stay with me. Here we are with our bounty:
Putting on the wedding was a community affair, with many of the bride and groom's family and friends contributing everything from food to decorations to painting signs to giving a hay ride shuttle from the parking lot at a neighboring farm:
For my part, I made two pies and a watermelon-pineapple-mint salad. They had barbecued chicken, rolls from a local bakery, and then six kinds of salads that folks made. Holly created the signs for each salad with her graphic design skills, placed in frames found at Goodwill:
Instead of wedding cake, they had wedding pie! I was the pie coordinator, and about a dozen people made two pies each. The variety was amazing and hard to choose from:
The two kinds I made were Shoofly, which is a brown sugar-molasses combo (on right), and Apricot Amaretto, which is apricots with almond flavoring (on left):
After the food and toasts and such, a bluegrass band played while a caller led us all in square dancing.
That was my first time square dancing, and I loved it! It was a lot of fun to switch up partners and learn new dance sequences. And the band was a hoot. Here's the bride and groom and others dancing...sorry it's a little blurry, but it's dusk and I didn't use my flash:
That night Juliana and I camped with a couple of other friends at a nearby campground. The next morning a small group of us went back to the farm to help clean up. We brought all the flowers to the front porch of the barn for a photo (the bride and groom are at the top of the stairs):
What a wonderful weekend, and I was so glad to be part of it all! Summer feels like it has ended because this past week, the students came back to Bear Creek. I went back to my regular school year schedule of 7:45am to 4:15pm, and man oh man was it a busy week! There was a packet of forms due in early August (emergency releases, sports forms, etc), which a lot of parents decided to bring the first day of school instead. The next day, a bouquet of flowers showed up at the front desk, and when I looked at the tag, they were for me! What a fun surprise from my supervisor, and she even included my favorite flowers, hydrangeas. The nurse gave me an orchid too, for helping her over the summer with many things, and I've always wanted one of those.
Here are two last photos, from when I took a day off work to hang out around Seattle with my visiting friend Juliana. We rode a ferry to Bainbridge Island and walked around Pike Place Market:
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