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Top:News:Personal Information Updates:LatestJump to the very latest news... September 1997 Eeek! I'm over a year behind for my personal updates! I won't try to fill in the blanks. I'll just talk about this month, as it is almost over. Let's see... we started the month with me coming home from the hospital after having surgery (an annoying cyst -- yech). Once I got home, I was essentially confined to bed for over two weeks -- no sitting, no lying on my back. This became extremely tiresome, as you can imagine. Thankfully, I had essentially zero pain from the surgery. I had plenty of aching from lying down so much, though. Ugh! Towards the end of this time on the couch, I moved my computer out into the living room and started redesigning this web site. As of right now, I still have quite a bit of work to do on it. While I was out of commission, so was Hamish (my pickup). He spent three weeks in the body shop getting the damage repaired from my sudden stop with a load of bricks back in July. Ouch! The shop took a week longer than they said they would, but he looks great -- better than new. Kim took a week of vacation mid-month. We spent the first half of it working around the house. The first Saturday of that week I had a Youth Ministries Commission meeting in Waldport for church. Considering we didn't have a quorum, the meeting went pretty well, I guess. On the way back, we stopped and waded in the unseasonably warm Pacific. That made up for the meeting. We went up to Studio of American Fencing in Portland the following Tuesday with our fencing master Jim Ciaramitaro last week and fenced for a couple of hours. On Wednesday, I started coming down with a cold. On Thursday, we met Wes and Carol at Spirit Mountain Casino for breakfast, and then spent the day in Lincoln City poking about. That was nice, too. On Friday, Kim and I went to Rockaway Beach for her best friend Shari's wedding. Shari was Kim's bridesmaid and now it was Kim's turn. Kim had never been in any wedding other than her own. Now she has. She also succeeded in her weeks of dieting and looked great in her dress. The wedding was outdoors (yes, in Oregon in September), but the weather held on Saturday, despite awful weather the night before. There were a few raindrops during the prelude music, but it stopped and hazy sunhine came in. Kim even got a mild sunburn (yeah, like that's really tough)! Our friend Alan turned 30 this month, so we went up to Portland for a birthday dinner at Sweetwater's Jam House (Jamaican food!). In attendance were Alan, John, Mike Ulwelling, Marina, Shawn & Amy, Meredith, and us. As always at Sweetwater's, a good time was had by all. Tip: the curried goat is really, really hot, and Red Stripe beer only helps a little bit in cutting the fire.... Trust me on this one. Movies/videos this month were Roots, Air Force One, and L.A. Confidential. Books this month (it's been a good month for books!):
October 1997 So far this month has been a good one. We've had some rain, some cooler weather, and some sunny days. We made major progress on the house this month. Kim's weight loss efforts have made both of us The first weekend of this month was my brother-in-law's birthday (happy birthday, Mark!), so we were up in Portland for the festivities. While there we dropped in on Shawn, Amy, and Alan. We went out to eat at Aztec Willie and Joey Rose's, a spiffy Mexican cafeteria/bar/restaurant with Salvadoran influences in the Irvington neighborhood. Great food, fabulous flan, and a mean margarita. If you go, take cash, though, as they don't take credit cards and the ATM in the restaurant charges $1.25 per transaction. The next weekend marked the Second Annual Clan Wayne FragFest at Mike and John's house. We spent most of the weekend happily slaughtering each other in Jedi Knight, the latest multi-player action game from LucasArts. A good time was had by all, once I got some rather nasty hardware problem resolved on my computer. That Wednesday after Byron and I finished working on the house, Kim and I went down to Albany to go out to dinner with Byron and Teresa. We went to a place we had been wanting to try for a long time: Novak's Hungarian. WOW! The food was hearty, interesting, and plentiful. The service was good. Papa Novak himself gave us some advice on what to order as first-timers. We felt like we were eating in someone's home. Byron actually liked the cabbage rolls, and he doesn't even like cabbage! Their desserts were excellent as well. Kim and I felt like we had stumbled back into Rose's Restaurant in Portland (before it was sold). The next Saturday, it was time to start dealing with the leaves. Since we have a chipper/shredder now, I asked several of our neighbors to send us their leaves. Our yard is in such bad shape after the construction that it needs all the help it can get. So, it's going to get a huge dose of leaf compost. The first batch of leaves took about two hours to deal with. It looks like "leafing" is going to be a several times a week job for a few weeks now But I get to use the chipper, and that's a lot of fun. Later that Saturday, Alan came down to Salem to chat about his new GURPS campaign. Which reminds me, I found a great store in Salem for gaming supplies called Borderlands. Anyway, also during that weekend we drove up to Ollalie Lake in the Cascades. It was a good thing we took Hamish, as the roads were pretty rough in some place. There is a small primitive resort there, believe it or not. Nice people runnig it. We even saw a few patches of early snow here and there. Along the way, we saw some stunning fall color, especially on the trip home with the late afternoon sun setting the golden leaves on fire. Books this month (so far):
Page created 9/30/97. |
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