My dad finally emailed me these pictures from Grandma’s 95th birthday party, She turned 95 January 11, 2006. I thought they were fitting pictures to post on mothers day.
She’s amazing. The day after these pictures were taken she set off on a road trip across the states.
I hope I look that good at 95. I hope I have that much energy.
After the waterfall we had to decide what to do for dinner. I would have loved to try the Salish Lodge; we stopped and checked out the menu, but frankly I was not inspired. When plates start at $23, the description on the menu should make my mouth water. We decided to head towards Issaquah instead.
Gillman village is a cute little shopping center in Issaquah comprised of a grouping of cottages on a boardwalk. The shops are cutesy and charming, ranging from toy stores, to yarn shops to kitchen gadgets – there is also an Amish furniture store that made me want to refurnish the whole house.
Gillman village also has an assortment a restaurants, but the only one we have ever tried is Bamiyan Afghani Restaurant, because how could you pass that up?
Bamiyan was originally just an Afghan restaurant, but we noticed that they’ve added more traditional Persian dishes as well (Persian food and Afghan food are very similar). We started with the Ausht, which was an amazing creamy and savory soup – very rich. Then Mr. H had the koobideh which is one of our all time favorite dishes. Koobideh is a savory ground beef kebab, the kind of savory where it’s difficult to stop eating even when you’re completely stuffed. I had the fesenjan. Fesenjan is one of those dishes that lives on a continuum, in this case between sweet and tart. The placement on that continuum depends largely on family recipe and geographic origin of that recipe. I asked the server how tart the fesenjan was and she claimed it was not too tart. Fesenjan is a dish of stewed chicken in a walnut and pomegranate gravy. The tartness of the dish depends on the amount of pomegranate juice used. It turned out a little more tart than I expected, but I like it really quite sweet. Nonetheless it was very good.
For desert, Mr. H had the Firni (custard with cardamom and pistachios). I went with the Bastani which is ice cream made with rosewater and pistachios (we served this at our wedding with the cake). To top it all off I got to watch Mr. H rap with the staff in Farsi which always turns me on.
Yummy, yummy, yummy, I love this place.
We had a bad case of cabin fever and just had to get out of the house so we hopped in the truck and drove around till we came across highway 20 – we got on highway 20 and kept going till we got to I-90 and then decided to go to North Bend.
North Bend is a really cute little town that reminds me a lot of the town I grew up in with Mount Si looming in the background the way Pioneer Peak loomed at the homestead. After puttering around North Bend for a while we headed up to Snoqualmie to check out the falls.
Snoqualmie Falls is definitely worth checking out. I’ve been there a dozen times and each time it tak
es my breath away.
I read The Da Vinci Code when it first came out. I bought the book and sat down and read it cover to cover in a day while I was on vacation. Then I read it again. The second time I read the book I was near a computer so I took the time to look up the art and some of the concepts referenced in the book. (There’s a newer version out now, with pictures of the referenced art work – I recommend the newer version if you can get your hands on it.)
It’s a good book. I read it cover to cover in a day and I need a riveting plot to get that done. But the plot is the best part of this book. It’s the plot that made it a best seller; the prose is ham-handed and he could have really used some help with line editing. But a good plot makes up for that – and should make for a good movie as you can breeze past the excessive use of adverbs and adjectives and just show what happened.
Controversy? Of course there’s controversy. And that helps with selling books. I read Satanic Verses because of the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie (excellent book, by the way). I read banned books. Controversy is the best way to get read.
Here’s what I think:
I mentioned in an earlier post that I had come up with (what I think is) a brilliant idea for Bebe’s birthday – a book celebrating Bebe and the number four.
So I’ve been calling around to get people to submit photos for this project. My dad apparently had a great deal of fun coming up with somthing to submit for the book – he submitted the following:
For this picture, the caption will say:
“Grandpa has four hands.”
His next submission for the project was this:
I still haven’t figured out what the caption will be…
Any suggestions?
How scary is that orange wall?
