Me too Pike, me too.

Thursday was Andrle's 43rd birthday so we celebrated with an outing to Din Tai Fung. The vegan spicy wontons are so good! After we got home I baked vanilla cupcakes. She then opened her cards and presents, including this auspiciously timed art piece we found at PAX. Print by Dianne Vaznelis aka Diha We closed the evening by listening to her "gift" from Taylor: four new songs!

Tried a new recipe of a type we've never had before: pizza beans with cashew mozz. Hearty! Fairly easy to make but it needs to simmer for a while, and produces good leftovers. Unfortunately I think we got a bad onion from TJs because even though it looked fine when dicing there were weirdly chewy bits in the stew!

Kid requested quesaritos for dinner last night, so we made Thee Burger Dude's vegan recipe. We conveniently already had all of the components, including two sizes of tortilla, VioLife cheddar, and Beyond Beef. We did skip the jalapeño brine but with his taco seasoning it's not needed. Enhanced the meal with some leftovers on the side. Yum!

Had a structural integrity collapse removing the cornbread from the casserole dish. I shouldn't have used the spray oil (or I should have also used parchment paper). Sheared right through the middle! Still delicious.

Started from an official recipe but switched up the filling. Tasty using some pre-cooked Thrilling Bakon, plus peppers and onions sautéed with a bit of rosemary. I had to bake them for about twice as long as called for, checking every 4-5 minutes to see how they had set. It's also very important to line the muffin tin or you will never get the mung bean residue out. We use washable silicone liners.

(Belated) Summer of Fun!! This one has been stuck in drafts for a long while so it's a touch overdue. Reading We finished Salamandastron and moved on to Martin the Warrior. I would have said I know these first six books well but it's really more the first three I reread the most; a lot of the characters and plot points are unfamiliar.

To celebrate Star Trek 60, we went to a theatrical special event combining the episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", a sci-fi clsssic, with the funniest of the original cast films "The Voyage Home". It was a lot of fun to laugh along with an audience! I was too little to see it in the theaters in 1986 but my dad shortly after that had recorded it off TV on VHS.

The district-union negotiations yesterday apparently went well so today was the first day of school. Hard to believe he's closer to college than kindergarten! Also jorts are so back.

Pike waiting to see his namesake.

Pike demonstrating his new Lambchop chew toy.

Technically our hotel was in Redmond, but we explored sights mostly in Bellevue. After picking blueberries we hung out, then headed back towards downtown for lunch at Din Tai Fung (mmm... spicy wontons...), some boba at Dont Yell At Me, and walking around. Before we cooked some dinner, we of course had to fit in some pool time.

This morning as the start of our Bellevue staycation with my parents we ventured to the Mercer Slough Blueberry Farm, walking on the marsh path (lots of bugs!) from the southern end of the South Bellevue light rail station. It was almost the end of the season but there were still some tasty berries on bushes at the far end in Zones 6 and 7. I can't remember the last time I went berry picking (somewhere in southern Michigan as a kid?) but it was a lot of fun and the marine layer kept it reasonably cool. Plus we get tasty blueberries for the rest of the week! (And they're probably E. coli-free!)

🤨

I don’t think the spider wanted to catch this

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POV: You are an area dad at the playground.

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I just think they’re neat. Watching them move about through the roof emergency exit of a New Flyer XT40 1 bus