Moved In
We've moved into our place here in Portland and are really liking it. We seem to always forget how exhausting it is to move but we're glad to be done with it--and hopefully for a LONG time. We made a bunch of trips to Ikea, got ourselves a couch, table, bookcase and chairs and had good luck with a number of items off of Craigslist too.
In fact, we found our new used car via Craiglist and are now the proud owners of a 2004 black Jetta. I've thought of the Jetta as a "chick car" for years, but have overcome that and really dig its excellent handling, acceleration and gas mileage. We made sure to buy a manual/stick shift to keep ourselves well-practiced for Europe.
This past weekend was Ivy's birthday and we had a great time spending it in the San Francisco bay area at a good friend's wedding and visiting with my sister Laurel in SF. Jesse and Jamie got married at the Fogarty winery and I had the privilege of being the best man and toasting/roasting Jesse. They're a wonderful couple (super smart--both UCSF doctors--and lots of fun) and Ivy and I look forward to spending lots of time with them in the decades ahead. Cool fact about Jamie's dad: he was an astronaut who traveled on the space shuttle. Cool fact about Jamie: she lived in Hong Kong for high school when her dad took a job overseas. I'm going to paste in some pictures here--including one of Jesse's parents: the most stylish couple ever. Imagine morphing the Beckhams and the Berlusconis and you get Dan and LiseAnne Shurter.
The weekend prior to that, we had a great time hearing Obama speak in Portland's Waterfront Park. It was truly a spectacular setting and it was packed--over 75,000 leftists, radicals, and granola-crunching revolutionaries, just like Ivy and me. Here's some youtube footage on it.
