Venecia (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} thesecondcircle) wrote,@ 2009-06-08 08:01:00 |
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Child-Free Weekend
Friday night was the night of all debauchery, I tell you. We get together with our friend M and went to the always amazing Hakatamon restaurant at Uwajimaya to pig out on sushi. It had been a difficult, busy week for all of us and raw fish and seaweed was just what we needed. From miso to green tea ice cream, it was a lovely meal. Ham made an unusually large mess, but also ate a ton of food (she even got to have some flying fish roe). I learned that I do not, in fact, like squid sushi (add it to the list with uni and raw quail egg).
Afterward we wandered the store a bit. M bought Ham a wee Hello Kitty pack to use this summer. We got her a little thermos bottle. The Hub got a bottle of saki and I browsed the craft books at the bookstore (Japanese craft books are kind of famous among lots of US crafty types and they are hard to find in most of the country). That place is the mecca of cute, let me tell you. The Japanese have totally cornered the market on cute (also on creepy, but let's not go there).
We headed back to the House of Perpetual Indulgence to get the Ham to bed, drink saki, and watch Grosse Point Blank (which M had never seen before).
Over the weekend Ham had her Aikido camp. It's a sports themed over-nighter and this is her second year. I volunteered to enter the registration forms into the computer but got off lightly as all the other dojos waited until the very last minute to submit. Ham's "place of the way" is the main one for the Oregon Ki Society, so we had lots of kids from Oregon, some from Washington, and a group all the way from Hawaii! Next year we'll probably volunteer for the event itself, but I have to admit it was wonderful having a grownup weekend to ourselves.
After dropping her off Saturday morning, we went back to the house to finish our coffee. Looking around we realized that the HPI had gotten somewhat chaotic recently -- particularly the dining room. When our dear friend M. came to stay with us, we moved the Hub's studio from the spare room to the little office and the bookshelves from the little office into the dining room. Now, we don't exactly have a large dining room to begin with. Then there's the fact that that much of our kitchen has spilled over into the dining room (including a stainless prep table, beer fridge, standing freezer, and metal shelving where we keep our pots and pans). This is what we get for having such a tiny kitchen. Finally, there were about 24 dozen empty beer bottles in boxes that we'd been diligently saving for months for what we hope will be a summer of homebrew.
The living room too was a mess and we decided that we weren't going to take it anymore!
So, we moved the bookshelves back into the office along with the bottles, cleared anything else extraneous out of both rooms and scrubbed, dusted, and vacuumed them. The Hub rewired and organized the cables to our living room electronics and I took the opportunity to make strawberry custard ice cream base.
When we were done we had a perfectly neat and ordered living room and dining room... but the office was a complete disaster. So, we cleaned that too. By the time we finished, it was just after lunch. BTW, I credit this ability to clean lots of stuff in a short period of time to the Hub, who's just a machine when he gets in the mood. Plus he's strong as an ox and can shove furniture around quite easily. He's taught me over the years that cleaning stuff up doesn't take nearly as long as people think, if you're efficient and don't waffle about it.
One thing we knew we wanted to do while Ham was out was watch a couple of non-Ham friendly movies. So we watched Iron Man and the new Hulk both of which were good but had that "adapted from a comic book and you're missing about half a dozen critical plot points" vibe. Then we went to New Seasons to pick up stuff for dinner. We had grilled sirloin burgers on kaiser rolls with gourmet chips and red wine. I put the ice cream base on to churn and we finished it off with ice cream for dessert.
After dinner I suggested Superman as a completion of the theme, but Hub was a bit burned out on action and wanted comedy -- so we put on one of my old favorites, The Witches of Eastwick (that we consider this a comedy probably tells you something about us).
Then we crashed out and slept without interruption until an unprecedented 8am!
Sunday morning started slowly. Hub had a band recording session in the afternoon, so he warmed up while I went to H-Mart (that's two giant Oriental groceries in one weekend) to stock up on fruit, veggies, and meat for the coming week. About two, I picked up Ham, who promptly crashed out as soon as I got her home and slept until dinner time.
The Hub made spaghetti with pork sausage sauce (with homemade Italian sausage and fresh oregano from the pot on the porch) and we had more of the ice cream. I can't get my ice cream to hold up as well as the store bought stuff yet -- not even the all natural stuff -- but I guess that just means we need to eat it up faster. I think next time I'll do mint, as we have a ton of fresh mint growing as well.
There's plenty I didn't get done this weekend. For example, I only managed do to a tiny bit of mending. But hey, we got to just zone out and relax a lot and we needed that.
Friday night was the night of all debauchery, I tell you. We get together with our friend M and went to the always amazing Hakatamon restaurant at Uwajimaya to pig out on sushi. It had been a difficult, busy week for all of us and raw fish and seaweed was just what we needed. From miso to green tea ice cream, it was a lovely meal. Ham made an unusually large mess, but also ate a ton of food (she even got to have some flying fish roe). I learned that I do not, in fact, like squid sushi (add it to the list with uni and raw quail egg).
Afterward we wandered the store a bit. M bought Ham a wee Hello Kitty pack to use this summer. We got her a little thermos bottle. The Hub got a bottle of saki and I browsed the craft books at the bookstore (Japanese craft books are kind of famous among lots of US crafty types and they are hard to find in most of the country). That place is the mecca of cute, let me tell you. The Japanese have totally cornered the market on cute (also on creepy, but let's not go there).
We headed back to the House of Perpetual Indulgence to get the Ham to bed, drink saki, and watch Grosse Point Blank (which M had never seen before).
Over the weekend Ham had her Aikido camp. It's a sports themed over-nighter and this is her second year. I volunteered to enter the registration forms into the computer but got off lightly as all the other dojos waited until the very last minute to submit. Ham's "place of the way" is the main one for the Oregon Ki Society, so we had lots of kids from Oregon, some from Washington, and a group all the way from Hawaii! Next year we'll probably volunteer for the event itself, but I have to admit it was wonderful having a grownup weekend to ourselves.
After dropping her off Saturday morning, we went back to the house to finish our coffee. Looking around we realized that the HPI had gotten somewhat chaotic recently -- particularly the dining room. When our dear friend M. came to stay with us, we moved the Hub's studio from the spare room to the little office and the bookshelves from the little office into the dining room. Now, we don't exactly have a large dining room to begin with. Then there's the fact that that much of our kitchen has spilled over into the dining room (including a stainless prep table, beer fridge, standing freezer, and metal shelving where we keep our pots and pans). This is what we get for having such a tiny kitchen. Finally, there were about 24 dozen empty beer bottles in boxes that we'd been diligently saving for months for what we hope will be a summer of homebrew.
The living room too was a mess and we decided that we weren't going to take it anymore!
So, we moved the bookshelves back into the office along with the bottles, cleared anything else extraneous out of both rooms and scrubbed, dusted, and vacuumed them. The Hub rewired and organized the cables to our living room electronics and I took the opportunity to make strawberry custard ice cream base.
When we were done we had a perfectly neat and ordered living room and dining room... but the office was a complete disaster. So, we cleaned that too. By the time we finished, it was just after lunch. BTW, I credit this ability to clean lots of stuff in a short period of time to the Hub, who's just a machine when he gets in the mood. Plus he's strong as an ox and can shove furniture around quite easily. He's taught me over the years that cleaning stuff up doesn't take nearly as long as people think, if you're efficient and don't waffle about it.
One thing we knew we wanted to do while Ham was out was watch a couple of non-Ham friendly movies. So we watched Iron Man and the new Hulk both of which were good but had that "adapted from a comic book and you're missing about half a dozen critical plot points" vibe. Then we went to New Seasons to pick up stuff for dinner. We had grilled sirloin burgers on kaiser rolls with gourmet chips and red wine. I put the ice cream base on to churn and we finished it off with ice cream for dessert.
After dinner I suggested Superman as a completion of the theme, but Hub was a bit burned out on action and wanted comedy -- so we put on one of my old favorites, The Witches of Eastwick (that we consider this a comedy probably tells you something about us).
Then we crashed out and slept without interruption until an unprecedented 8am!
Sunday morning started slowly. Hub had a band recording session in the afternoon, so he warmed up while I went to H-Mart (that's two giant Oriental groceries in one weekend) to stock up on fruit, veggies, and meat for the coming week. About two, I picked up Ham, who promptly crashed out as soon as I got her home and slept until dinner time.
The Hub made spaghetti with pork sausage sauce (with homemade Italian sausage and fresh oregano from the pot on the porch) and we had more of the ice cream. I can't get my ice cream to hold up as well as the store bought stuff yet -- not even the all natural stuff -- but I guess that just means we need to eat it up faster. I think next time I'll do mint, as we have a ton of fresh mint growing as well.
There's plenty I didn't get done this weekend. For example, I only managed do to a tiny bit of mending. But hey, we got to just zone out and relax a lot and we needed that.
