Subterranean fungi

As you may or may not know, Saturday was Amanda and my fifth wedding anniversary.
Congratulation to us.
We celebrated by spending the day peddling Bread and Badger wares in the 100 degree heat at a farmer's market downtown, but honestly, it was a pretty great day.
You see, I thought I knew what a farmer's market was, a small gathering of veggie vendors in a public place. As such, I was completely unprepared for this event.
This was a farmer's market, Portland style. A complete city block was filled with fruits and vegetables, flowers, cheese, wine, prepared foods, seafood and other meats including lamb and buffalo, all of it locally produced and fresh. Oh yeah, and mushrooms...



I have never seen fresh morels, or any sort of truffle before, fresh or otherwise.
If you ever get the chance, which is very unlikely if you are not visiting Portland, trying truffles is definitely recommended.
The smell is simply incredible, much like a morel or a porcini, multiplied by x100.
Which is more or less what they cost as well...

As for other news, I'm currently rocking a 'stache. No worries, I'm not planning on becoming a cop, I still have my goatee as well.



Cast your vote if it should stay or go, because I can't decide if I like it or not.

Going Broke in Style

We finally went down and got our new car today!!! It's pretty awesome. We got a good deal on trading in our Jetta, and we finagled our monthly payments down to a manageable number. It only took 4 1/2 hours! Ugh. Sean and I are totally wiped out, especially considering we woke up early on a Saturday (official sleeping-in-day) to get it all done.

No more broken transmission! No more funny noises, strange smells and poor gas mileage! No more peeling paint and having to see "TJ" marked into our trunk every day!

Hooray for not one, but TWO glove boxes! Seven cup holders! Built-in ipod and aux. plugs! Stereo controls on the steering wheel!

We even got it in our first choice color, which they had to get from another dealership. We were afraid we'd have to wait until Monday, since we were told they were selling out really fast, but I think we got pretty lucky. It was a great experience, even though it was exhausting. I think they really wanted us to understand everything, and it helped that we'd done so much research and planning beforehand.

I didn't take any interior pictures, since you can see better photos of the bizarro dashboard console on their website. It'll take some getting used to, but it's so worth it. :)

Teamwork!

Remember those cool etched discs I posted about a while ago? Well, Leah has turned them into mobiles, and put pictures up on her Flickr page!! We're still working out the details, but I think they're going to be for sale in one of our Etsy shops.

Rose Garden

We went to the Rose Garden yesterday inside Washington Park. It was a gorgeous day, but hardly any roses were blooming. I took some pictures anyway, which you can see on my Flickr page. There were a lot of other people walking around the gardens, picnicking, and lounging in little corners of the park.

One of the weirdest things about the Rose Garden to me is the way we entered. I knew we could get there if we walked west on Burnside long enough, and as we were trekking uphill past a Chico's store and a bank, I spotted a stone wall with a tiny sign marked "Rose Garden". There was a narrow stone stairway that lead up the steep ivy-covered hillside, so we went up.

It was almost a completely vertical climb up staircase after staircase, occasionally turning to follow the slope. Then we were in the woods. Completely in the woods. You'd never know that we'd just been shopping 10 minutes earlier on one of the trendiest streets in a major metropolitan area. I tell ya, this city is like no other I've ever been to!

After we'd had our fill of nature, we headed back down to 23rd Ave and found the Lompoc bar. We were just in time to see the 8th inning of the Red Sox/Orioles game! We had some pub food and some awesome beer and enjoyed the game.

Last night was the Starlight Parade, which we were intending to avoid, but we caught some glimpses of it as we were stuck in traffic on the busride home. I don't think we missed much, but the rest of the city didn't seem to think it could pass it up. They sure do love their parades here!