Saturday

No, it's not snowing in Portland. But we want it to. Everyone has their own version of a snow dance (at REI, we hold an annual twinkie roast) and posting a photo of a snowy tree on my blog is my offering to the skies. Bring us more of the white stuff! I have Wednesday off and I want to ski!

Friday

Ooo, it hurts to be a Husker these days, doesn't it?

Thursday

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. My reasons are three-fold: 1) It's probably the last holiday that hasn't gone completely retail and all-corporate and really, seems to me to be the only holiday that is truly about spending time with those you love. No presents, just family. Family and food of-course, which brings me to 2) the food. Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, yams, cranberries, the green bean casserole, pumpkin pie, apple crisp, etc. I could go on for days. It's positively the best food ever. Ever. And 3) Thanksgiving usually means that I get to see my family and we get to play games.

I love my family and I love that I grew up in a family that likes to play games. Board games, chinese checkers, battleship, "bunko" (that weird game with the dice), cards, etc. My mom's family, the Von Seggern side, plays this fantastic game that we call "cantelope." Just imagine 10 people sitting around a table all trying to play solitaire at the exact same time, using the exact same aces. And you have to shout out "cantelope!" when you win. It's a riot.

Last Thanksgiving, B and I met my aunt, uncle, cousins and their friends at their cabin in the Wallowa mountains of Eastern Oregon. When we get together with this particular bunch of family and friends, sometimes the meal starts to become this thing we have to endure before we can play cantelope. We get fierce, we get competitive. Claire, you are hands-down usually the winner (only because my mom isn't there) and Judy, you always sneak up on us and win one out of the blue. How do you do it? Here's a photo from the game last year:
See my uncle Tim standing up at the far end of the table? Yep, that's blatant cheating right there. And everyone is blurry because everyone, right at this second, is trying to put a two of spades on the same ace in the middle. Oh, the drama.

Anyway, we spent this Thanksgiving with our good friends Travis and Jody. They hosted all the Nebraska orphans at their house this year and Jody cooked a feast! The best part? We got to play games. We made our way through a rules-and-regulation-laden sports trivia game and then the boys retired to the backyard for some games of another sort.
This is what they call Polish Horseshoes. I'm sure it has evolved over the years. I'm sure it has nothing to do with Poland, but I can definitely see the horseshoe connection. The object of the game? Throw the frisbee so it knocks the beer bottle off the other team's pole. Oh, did I mention this game involved beer? Yep, it does and really, therein lies the problem. Because it's probably only about 45 degrees out, it's windy and you have to hold a really cold beer. No problem!
Jody, Travis? Thank you so much for being part of our family. We had a great time with you on Thursday and we are so thankful to have friends like you in our lives. Oh, and B thanks you for the glove.

Wednesday

I think I've mentioned before that Bryan is a great cook. A fantastic cook in fact. And it's no lie that I let him do most of the cooking around our house. I mean, if he likes doing it and he's really good at it, who am I to deny it from him?

Anyway, B may be the chef, but I'm definitely the baker. Wednesday was baking day-- a pumpkin spice cake for Thanksgiving day and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies for the little REI elves on Black Friday. Here are some shots:

Tuesday

I'm sure you have heard of the website Flickr. It's straight-up awesome. It's great for you because you can store all of your digital photos. It's great for me because I can then sit and pore through all of your digital photos.

I get lost on Flickr. I could spend hours just clicking on images that catch my eye and then looking at that person's photography and then their "favorites" and then the photography of their favorites, and on and on and basically, it's a circle that never ends with me. Anyway, what I like to look at most is pictures of other people's homes. It seems to be a trend in the blogging/Flickr world (at least the part of the blogging/Flickr world I seem to belong to) to show off your home through a series of photos. Little corners of your life, on the web, for anyone (me!) to look at. (Go to my Flickr page and click on Favorites to see what I mean.)

B and I thought we would put ourselves out there and try a little mini tour to spice things up a bit. Keep in mind though that these people, these photographers, these artists, seem to have very immaculate homes, always super clean and everything is so neatly and artfully arranged........ Ours on the other hand, is purely shot the way we found it. Heh, heh.

Here's my sewing basket:Cameras from B's collection:And my favorite, a very, not-even-close-to-being-staged, photo of B's breakfast this morning. I found this woman on Flickr who has published a book of photography of her breakfast. Check her out here. She's making money off shots just like this. Looks like we're on our way to a healthy, wealthy retirement, eh?

Monday

B is really the "professional" photographer in the house. I always say I want to learn and then he offers to teach me some tips and tricks and then I say (usually, with my sassy little hand on my hip), "No, I want to learn on my own!" And he chuckles, " Heh, heh, well ok, here's the camera, go have a good time."

The following shots are what happens when I get the camera. Monday's sky was so beautiful with all the layers of clouds as the stormy weather passed through. And the leaf with the water droplets? That was me messing around with the "macro" lens. It lets you take super close-ups and makes everything in the background look blurry and mysterious. B, the professional, would say "Oh, look at that, it has great depth of field."

Yeah, whatever. It looks awesome with a capital AWE.

Sunday

So, it has been raining for three days. Three days of non-stop drizzle, showers, and pouring down rain. As you can probably gather from the following photos, I didn't leave the house.

Still just a tourist

When I first arrived in Portland, I thought I would be able to blend in fairly seamlessly. I didn't have a crazy southern accent or sound like I was from the Bronx. Even though B says I talk like I lived in Minnesota for five months (which I did), I thought that I looked like the locals so no one would really know that I just moved here. And that theory worked, for awhile.

"Yeah, we were down by the Willamette river," I would say. (Willamette pronounced wil-la-met-tee.) Or, "just take Couch street." (Couch pronounced like couch.)

Then I realized that everyone I talked to started saying things like, "where are you from?" or "did you just move here?" I couldn't figure out what was giving me away. Finally, I was clued in.

The Willamette river? It's the wil-lam-et river, like "the Willamette, damnit."
Couch street? It's coo-ch street. That one I'll never figure out.

But the hardest one yet has been Champoeg. Cham-poo-eg? Chaum-pey?
Nope. Sham-poo-ee. Maybe it's French or something.

Anyway, you don't have to pronounce it right to enjoy it, so B and I spent a gorgeous fall Sunday afternoon biking to Champoeg State Park south of Portland last weekend.

Junkies! All of you!

So, word is that you are wondering when I'm going to post something new. Everyone's itching to read some new Hoybook adventures. It's as if you all got a little dose of some gayle crack and now you're back for more. Anyway, to give you junkies another fix, here's two photos of me from the top of Tom, Dick & Harry mountain after a hike last week. That's early season snow on Mt. Hood in the background. Once that snow line gets down to the trees, we can go skiing. We can't wait to go skiing. I will crush you. I will crush you like bug.