RIBBIT! from Brent Spore on Vimeo.

Hope you get a chance to do some of this stuff! Thanks Luz!

(P.S. Some of the movies may be gone now, just FYI.)

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Day 1 (Queen Anne-oriented):

- Get breakfast at the 5 Spot.  Hair of the Dogwich is tasty, but the bloody mary salad side is the real treat.  French toast is also delectible.  Actually, everything is.  Haven’t tried the Puerto Rico breakfast items yet, but they look taaaaaaasty.

- Coffee at El Diablo.  All Cuban coffee drinks.  Just up Queen Anne Ave from 5 Spot.

- Walk up Queen Anne (this is good if Michelle and Cadie come.  There’s some fun kids shops and a really awesome game store further up the road, all within easy walking distance)

- Easy Street Records.  You HAVE to go here.

- Lunch at  Pagliacci Pizza or at Dick’s, which is right behind that (ONLY get the deluxe burger with fries and a shake.  Everything else is meh.). Cheap, tasty pizza.  Call Isaac to join you.  He works right behind there.

- Drive over to Fremont and walk around there.  Start with gelato at Royal Grinders behind the statute of Lenin.  Get an afternoon beer at Dad Watson’s (get the cajunized tots if you want something to munch on).  Really cool guitar/strings shop in the main area.  OR…

- Spend the afternoon in Wallingford.  Stop at Archie McPhee and then walk east on 45th.  Get Ice Cream at Molly Moo’s.  Coffee at Fuel.  Cupcakes at Trophy.  Asian food anywhere. Open Books: A Poem Emporium for poetry.  Catch “500 Days of Summer” at the Guild 45th Theater (one of the landmark theaters.  gorgeous!)

Day 2:

- Get coffee at Bedlam.  Coffee’s alright, but it’s a cool little location.  There’s sushi nearby, too.
- Get tomato soup cupcakes at Yellowleaf Cupcakes.
- Get donuts at Top Pot.  Not close by, but not too far away.  Seattle’s best donuts in my opinion.  And a great place to work out of, too, FYI.

Stuff that’s close to downtown:
Stumptown
Peter Miller (also Design Within Reach store and a really cool paper and organizational store close by.  not joking when I say this is what design heaven looks like.)
Byrnie Utz Hats
Wild Ginger (satay bar. hear it’s amazing.)

Day trips:
- Portland.  (Take Amtrak.  You’ll have to research dates.  Can get there in ~$50.  Otherwise, it’s about a two-hour drive.)
- Snoqualmie Falls.  Some info here and here.

Misc tours and museums and such
- Seattle Underground Tour (family-friendly)
- Iron Man is being shown on the lawn of the Seattle Center on Saturday at 9p.  Free.  http://www.seattlecenter.com/programs/detail.asp?EV_EventNum=41
- Seattle Art Museum has some cool exhibits right now.  Click on the link with the box cutter and watch the video of the guy doing wall paintings.  Seriously cool.

This morning, Brent and I woke up to the realization that Google had done a pretty extensive April Fool’s joke and they just happened to calle it CADIE – that’s right, the name of our daughter. We even had Matt Cutts of Google “follow” our daughter’s Twitter account. Someone from Google asked what Cadie wanted to be when she grew up. We responded as their “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed Intelligence Entity.” A Panda Candy Bar that creates the internets on other planets, of course! Geeky, I know. But funny and fun nonetheless. Their “entity” supposedly loves Pandas. Here’s the website they came up with: http://cadiesingularity.blogspot.com/.

Anyway, I hope you had a nice April Fool’s Day! It’s so beautiful outside here in Phoenix, it’s easy to be a little crazy! So get crazy!! (And wish me luck in this blogging endeavor…)

MS

So I’ll just say it – I saw MC Hammer in concert in Oakland – his home town.

[For more, click below.]Yes it was the early 90′s, and it was insane. I probably lost 10 pounds from dancing, and his dancers probably lost 50 pounds. I don’t think they ever stopped dancing. It was crazy!

So where is the Hammer nowdays? Well, I just found out he’s on Twitter – That came via Brent telling me & me discovering it online all around the same time last year. He’s got a site called dancejam.com a community of dance-jammers (so to speak) getting together uploading and voting on dances.

Hilarious!

West Coast Tour

Brent, Cadie and I just returned from a 5-day trip that actually turned into 12 days. Holy cow!

We had lots of fun doing our ‘West Coast Tour’, I’ll call it. We started up in Seattle for Thanksgiving and stayed a few days afterwords hanging out with family and friends. We ate at this cool diner that Brent’s cousins saw on the FoodNetwork’s Diners, Dives & Drive-In’s. Way good. We saw Brent’s old high school buddy & wife, and I got to go to my FAVORITE coffee shop in Seattle: Vivace!! (What-up Vivace homies!!) Vivace actually had to move locals… some sort of “emanate domain” issue. The word on the street is that the city was going to build their light rail right through the old shop. It was a great old place, very “coffee house”-esque, but their new place is so beautiful. You have to check them out when in Seattle up in the Capitol Hill dist. A bonus- we got to meet Brent’s friend (and mine now!) Derek Punsalan for coffee and we also hung out with Chris Pirillo then too. They were both gracious enough to talk tech talk with Brent for a few hours while Brent’s & my friend (Fred) and I talked seminary talk. We concluded our long stay with seeing friends from Maple Valley & we chilled at the SouthCenter mall – that’s what you do when you’ve got 4 kids under the age of four tagging along. Yep, we had a blast up in WA. And I even saw the sun the afternoon we had coffee with the fellas.

So we’re at the SeaTac airport about to head back to Phoenix, and Brent’s like, “I don’t want to go back to Phoenix yet.” So what do we do? We jump online (while sitting in the airport parking lot) & re-route to the Oakland airport. That’s right, OakTown baby. After buying some Crocs at the airport (not the ugly kind), we fly to the Bay Area – that’s where I’m from. That means I’ve got family and friends there too, whom we saw. That was great! After driving past Emeryville where Pixar lives (and watching Brent cry his sorry eyes out for not being able to visit them), we drove to the north bay. Brent, Cadie & I stayed a few nights at the Union Hotel in Benicia (the town where I graduated high school BTW). It was kinda nice acting like a tourist in my old home town. It’s a rather cute water-front artsy type of town that I totally recommend you vising one day. So we completely surprised my mom at her work. She was totally shocked to see us. It was worth it all to see the look on her face! We concluded our little Bay Area trip by driving up to Napa to see the beautiful vineyards and landscape there. We ate at Napa Style, Michael Chiarello’s restaurant (he’s on the Food Network) and it was so good! And guess what, Micahel Chiarello totally showed up. I sort of freaked out. Brent was like, “Are you gonna go & meet him?” Nah, I was having too much fun eating his food & feeding Cadie some of their yummy bread. We took some great pics of Cadie up there & I’m pretty sure Brent streamed a little bit of our time there too.

We finally booked our “return” flight to Phoenix on Friday… which actually included a stop in OC. So on Sunday we left Oakland for …. you guessed it… Disneyland!! We met up with Justine and were able to be her “tour guides” to Disneyland and California Adventure since it was her first time there. Gosh, we ran around everywhere in those two theme parks. Cadie was such a trooper. So was Justine. I totally have a blister on my toe from it all (dumb Crocs). We had a midnight dinner at IHOP, where Brent captured the funniest video of Justine making Cadence laugh. (As of right now, close to 17,000 people have viewed it on YouTube.) You’ll have to check it out! We concluded our Southern California adventure with hanging out with one of my best friends Kelli & her daughter at the Gypsy Den in Santa Ana. Brent says that he felt like such a hippy eating there, but I totally love it & the food/coffee.

Then, we came back to Phoenix where it’s in the 70′s. Bet you’re jealous!

Have a Merry, Merry Christmas everyone!