AB^2 + X + 2c

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Portland trip Post #2

So obviously we went to Portland for the game and stayed for a long weekend.

While driving thru traffic, we noticed a Customized Gold Teeth store....how ghetto is that? That's right folks, this is Portland...

So for a few weeks, we talked about doing dinner at Red Robin before the game. But since traffic was awful, we hit up Wendy's instead. Finally we made it to Red Robin for lunch on Saturday. They had this really cool art piece made of baseballs, of course Anthony liked the masterpiece.

The most important thing was to get a bottomless ROOT BEER FLOAT. It was super tasty even though it was Barq's (Anth's least favorite root beer).

So since we'd postponed the red robin/root beer float extravaganza, for dessert after the game we went to 7-11 for snacks and a Slurpee. Amy claims that she had never had a Slurpee in her almost 30 years of life. Some call shenanigans on that, but that is the best of her recollection. So we mixed up Coke and Blue Raspberry Slurpee flavors to create one mad delicious treat! We also went to the Seven 11 at least one other time, so we're best friends now...

That black bag is the most beautiful thing we have ever seen! (and the second bag we saw floating around dirty Portland... enough to inspire and American Beauty shot...)

This was our hotel. It was nice, had a pool and was within walking distance to the Rose Garden. Win win.

MMMMMMM, Airheads from 7-11 for a tasty and healthy (ok, not so much) snack! Amy had tootsie roll pops... mmmm, grape!

Any trip we go on is a good time to get caught up on movies and DVD's from the library. We watched 4 movies and some of Season 4 of the wire.

Amy found an excellent place for dinner. Anthony ordered a sturgeon with manilla clams and saffron mashed potato. It was delicious but there was some type of sausage in the red sauce (which we pushed aside) and under the potato which was annoying but that piece of fish really made up for it. It was amazing!

Amy ordered a scallop dish with pureed carrots. It too was excellent.

The restaurant was very chic. Anthony was pondering something very serious and educational in this shot. Ok, probably not, but it is possible.

Ok, less chic and more goofy. Par for the course for a Benezra male.

Amy looked very pretty in this shot even though she won't admit it. (She thinks she has pregnant fat face)

Davis Street Tavern was the name of the restaurant (seen in the background here).

The Ho Louie! Keep Portland weird...

This sign "Keeping Portland Weird" really defines the city. While it is a nice sister city to Seattle, much like Vancouver BC, it is dirty, has more bums, more weird people and Oregon Ducks/supporters. So really, Oregon is to Washington like Mexico is to the USA.

We tried to go to Voodoo doughnuts, but the line wrapped around the block. We waited for 20 minutes and gave up. We even tried driving by the next day and saw the same thing. Next time we will try Voodoo and their famous amazing doughnuts.

Portland Trailblazer game for Anth's birthday

So, last August one of Anthony's birthday presents from Amy was that he could pick a Portland Trailblazer basketball game to go to. The obvious choices were Orlando to see JJ Redick, Miami to see LeBron James and Dwayne Wade, Lakers to see Kobe or Oklahoma to see the SONICS, we mean old Sonics and Kevin Durant. We went with the Sonics... umm "Thunder"...

Finally 7+ months later, we went to Portland for a long weekend. We noticed Sonic fans all over the arena dressed in Sonic gear. This was a great t-shirt, forget what the front said, but these guys were getting thumbs up signs all night.

Instead of a flying blimp like key arena had, there was a car/blimp. It was pretty cool and dropped off free stuff for fans. Unfortunately we didn't win anything.

Kevin Durant and Nick Collison warming up before the game. Amazingly enough after doing a bit of research, it was found that Collison makes 13.27 Million dollars this year. Yep, the NBA is broken. No offense Nick!

Now, who doesn't appreciate a Captain Mo ad up in the rafters? That is a nice touch Rose Garden!

Lamarcus Aldridge has become a beast for Portland this year. He finished with over 30 points and really dominated.

We would not normally put pictures of the cheer leaders on the blog but these girls were doing aerial tricks and flips all game. So props to them. They weren't the actual cheerleaders, they had some other name... kinda like drill team instead of cheer squad. The actual cheerleaders were lame and not so good...

Weak sauce mascot. What a Kitty cat has to do with a Trailblazer, we won't ever know. His name is Blaze and he's supposed to be a "Trail Cat"... but Amy liked calling him the Rip City Kitty. Rip City is a nickname for the Rose Quarter/Garden... but really has no real reason for existing, similar to the "Trail Cat"... and you wonder why Oregon has no NFL or MLB team... they are TOO LAME!

Jump ball. Nice picture Amy!

Portland couldn't compete with the exception of Aldridge who has double digits in the 1st quarter.

Durant started the game on fire. He hit shot after shot and OKC got up big.

Get that weak crap out of here. How great if a shot is this?

Anytime the referees needed to go to instant replay, secret service like agents came out to make sure security was top notch. Look how intimidating they are! Ooooooh, I'm so scared!

The owner of the Trailblazers is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. His guest tonight was in all black....none other than legendary comedian Dan Aykroyd.

Brandon Roy is slowly coming back from knee injuries and played sparingly tonight.

Former Sonic guard Nate McMillan is the coach for Portland. He always wears fancy suits and is quite angry and agitated most of the game. He ended up getting a technical foul for arguing a call.

As the game went on, Kevin Durant kept shooting and the shots stopped falling. He (pictured with a towel on his head) ended up with decent stats but missed 10 three-point shots.

James Hardin got hot and kept OKC in the game. Tough to see in this picture but Marcus Camby the Blazer forward has eyes on that ball and potential rebound.

This free throw was one of Brandon Roy's only points. He finished with 4 pts total, all on free throws.

We had to get a shot of the "Birthday Boy" at halftime with players warming up in the background. It's a super close up shot because we'd only brought our zoom lens and Anth could only get 3 rows away for the shot... still a good one though!

It was an awesome weekend getaway, our last trip before X-day. More about the rest of the trip in a separate post.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Crib Build Day

Norman and Lynn generously got the baby room off to a good start furniture wise. For Amy's shower they bought us the crib, changing table, mattress, changing pad and mattress cover - super generous! YAY, we were SO excited and are so grateful!

The boxes for the crib and changing table were way too big to fit in the 4 Runner, so they got what they could in the SUV and tied the other part to the roof to get it home from the store.

Upon their arrival at our place, Sark volunteered to help and we told him to sit this one out. We will use you next time dude.

Lynn and Mute played upstairs a bit while Norman and Anthony put the furniture together. Keeping her busy was a priority as she also wanted to help build furniture... and by "build" we mean "destroy with her teeth"

This is what the Tundra looked like with all of the boxes loaded up prior to coming to Kirkland. The boxes couldn't even lay flat, that's how big they were...

Anthony had to keep taking phone calls throughout the beginning of the process, but eventually the crib and changing table were completed. We won't show photos yet as we are waiting for all the furniture to come in before deciding on the final placement of each piece.

Norman and Lynn, thank you so much for buying, picking up, delivering and helping to put together the furniture. We appreciate it and Xander will too in about 2 months!

Amy's visit with the Stewarts

Maureen and Amy had a girl date set for the last Saturday in March. When Maureen's car started leaking oil and Jon got put on call for the weekend, Amy decided it was best to go up and visit the whole crew. On her drive up she, of course, stopped at LaFeen's... but they were out of blueberry fritters! She settled for an apple fritter and some chocolate bars for the Stewarts... mmmm, SO good!

It was great, as always, to catch up with Maureen, Jon and Collin. Collin is such a cutie and made the perfect subject for Amy's photography practice session with the new camera. A sampling of the photos is below; enjoy!