Making progress around the house

So this week went by super fast as we had a lot going on! On Wednesday night we went to a street fair and ended up doing some tasting at a local distillery. Apparently Portland has a "distillery row" that is distinct to Portland. A handful of distilleries are making their own local liquors and other things. We tasted quite a few things at New Deal Distillery in Southeast Portland and ended up going home with a few bottles. So now our bar area is almost fully stocked!

After hanging out at the street fair we went wandering around to try to find something to eat for dinner. We were really in the mood for pizza and ended up at this corner that has some food carts. We decided to give food cart pizza a whirl and it was awesome! 

This is one of the food carts - not the one we ate at

Brick oven pizza for $7 from a food cart! Whah?

Breadsticks

You can't see it but they were showing an 80's Sylvester Stalone movie

So that was another happy accident! 

Thursday night I had a networking event at a driving range that was pretty fun. Friday I took off from work early and we went over to The Bite of Oregon. For my Dallas friends it's like Taste of Addison but smaller. 

The crowd at the Bite of Oregon

The Tilt stand where we got our dinner

Sweet burger from Tilt

Chicken biscuit and fries from Tilt

Having fun :)

Apple pie a la mode for Victor

Marionberry sour cream pie for me sans ice cream

After The Bite we went over to a friend's house in Northwest Portland for a while. We'd never been to that part of town before and walked past some pretty awesome little shops and restaurants while in the neighborhood. I think we'll have to check it out soon! We've mostly stuck to the downtown area where I work and the Southeast neighborhoods. Northwest has a much more young professionals vibe, which is more our style :)

So of course, Victor left town yesterday for a work trip and I got a flat tire! Right on cue. For those of you that might not know, over the past year I think I've had 3 or 4 flat tires. A ridiculous number. And they almost always occur when Victor isn't around.

My sweet little Mini Couper

The GIGANTIC screw in my tire!

So needless to say tomorrow morning I will be driving all the way to Beaverton to get this baby fixed :(

Okay, now on to some updated pictures from around the house!

The biggest thing we've done in the past month, besides getting the deck stained, the fence painted, and a lawn care person, is getting more pictures hung up around the house. It's the little things, I know. But it is really a great thing to get all these frames off the floor and onto a wall!

The entryway

These posters got put up in Victor's office (I love them!) Got them off of Fab.com

Also got these frames up on another wall in Victor's office

One thing I am particularly proud of is getting the guest room 90% done. I took a quilt I made while in Dallas just for fun and built the room around it. Most of the things we already had, I just bought the sheets and that's about it. I really love the silver frames on the wall with swatches of fabric in the quilt. Please excuse the pink side tables :) That's the 10% of the room that isn't done! Victor and I still need to sand these babies down to get rid of the pink and stain them a color found in nature ;)

One other thing I've done that I'm pretty proud of are these two pillow covers I've made. I started with a couple of gifted pillows that are nice and fluffy but needed a new cover. 

Before

I used some fabric I already had and made a simple envelope cover for them that almost look like ombre. They are just different shades of grey, blue, navy and black.

Front - grey and navy blue

Back - grey and navy with a panel of black

One of the covers I painted with some song lyrics from one of our favorite songs. I'm debating whether to do this on the others. I have two more covers to make, I just haven't gotten around to it yet ;)

The Lumineers (love)

We've recently gotten some exciting news from two very special couples... so I am feverishly sewing away at baby gifts that are still gender neutral :) Victor is in North Carolina until Sunday and I don't have much planned for the next week other than getting things done around the house when I'm not at work. If anything exciting happens I'll post it here!

Have a great week,

tasha

July update

Okay so I have been just awful at updating this lately. We've been busy trying to get out there and meet people and enjoy the amazing weather so the past month has just flown by! It's hard to believe the fall tax season is almost here and Victor is almost 30!!

Here's a quick recap of our July since my last post in the beginning of July.

A few weeks ago I went to Portland Meadows with some people from work. We dressed up like we were going to the Kentucky Derby and had a great time. There were even a few other twenty somethings dressed up as ridiculously as we were so that was fun. Here are some pictures from that night.

These are my bets - I had no idea what I was doing and didn't win anything

Did I mention it was $1 beer night? :)

 Peanut Butter also had her first bath in the new house. She was not very happy about it!

Our neighbor has been putting in some kind of concrete path that we can't quite figure out. Its been a multi-week project that has the dogs quite upset. But it looks like hopefully they will be done soon? Can't wait to see what the end product looks like.

Then a few weekends ago we had a pretty eventful Saturday. We started the day off with hitting the driving range. I am somewhat determined to re-learn to play golf and not be totally embarrassed. This was day one at the driving range but I've been back a few times and even went to a Ladie's Night clinic. This week I have a networking event at a driving range that should be interesting!

After the range we went in search of some lunch and ended up at a street fair on Mississippi Avenue. This is a street in Southeast Portland that we are big fans of. We've been to a few restaurants on that street a few times and decided to check out the street fair and see what it was all about. It was crazy! 

We got there towards the end of it and it was still totally packed. All these booths are local photographers, crafters, etc. and then there were also food carts and other booths for local businesses.

This is a booth we saw that was selling a traditional cheese bread you find in Brazil. We went back twice because Victor liked them so much. But I couldn't get him to try to talk to the girls at the booth in Portuguese :) I think they might be selling these in some stores in town, but they will never compare to Rosa's homemade!

So we finally got some food from some trucks and it was AMAZING! I had a korean pork belly wrap that was to die for. It didn't last long enough to take a picture of :)

Victor got this catfish po boy that was awesome. My first reaction was fish from a food truck in 80+ degree weather? Gross. But it was the best catfish we had ever had. Now we don't eat a ton of catfish, but after living in the south, I thought what we had there was as good as catfish could probably get. WRONG. This was awesome. Here's Victor digging in...

We will have to go back to these trucks at some point!

After the food trucks we went to see the Timbers play the LA Galaxy in soccer. It was my first time at Jeld-Wen field and it was so much fun! Plus we got to see Beckham score a few pretty stellar goals. Here are some pics

Here's Beckham in his pink shoes

Letting out the green flares after we scored a goal

Us in our Timbers gear :)

Beckham again :) 

So even though the Timbers lost it was still a great game to see. That was a pretty big day for us so we spent most of Sunday recuperating and catching up around the house :)

Last weekend we went over to the Oregon Brewers Festival downtown to check that out. I swear there is something cool going on every weekend here, its pretty overwhelming! The Brewers Festival was awesome. I can't even tell you how many different beers and brewers they have there, but you just have to buy a mug and then each 3 oz. taster is $1. You can go from beer to beer and taste them all if you wanted to! This was really cool and we got to taste some awesome beers from local brewers that we never would have tasted otherwise. I think if we go again next year we'll be a little more prepared and probably go with a group of people.

So we've been enjoying the amazing weather here as much as possible. The other night we tried to hang out of the porch and I was so cold I had to wear a blanket around my shoulders. This week it has warmed up quite a bit and was in the 90's this weekend. 

On Friday I had a volunteer day for work at a non profit in Portland. After volunteering all day we had a company picnic and barbecue. Victor got to go to that and meet some of my coworkers for the first time which was awesome. After a long day we just came home and crashed on Friday night.

Last night we met one of our good friends from college who is a native Oregonian for dinner in the Pearl District. It was warm, but not as warm as it is in Texas or North Carolina! Look, we are both wearing long sleeves :) We went out to eat at a place called the Jamison which is on Jamison Square. It was really fun and great to catch up. Today we slept in and went to the Oregon Air Show in Hillsboro. I'll post some pictures from that and how our house is shaping up sometime this week... I promise :)

Have a great week!

tasha