Seafair part One!

This weekend was kind of our start to Seattle's Annual Seafair. There are events all summer long, with the big shebang next weekend with the boat races and Blue Angels air show. Saturday we started out with a visit to one of Ryan's projects so he could check out an issue that the client was concerned about. Also, I hadn't seen this one under construction yet, so I wanted to check it out! As usual it's awesome and has some amazing outdoor spaces and views of Lake Washington. We're also nerds and were checking out some of the features in the home for use in our soon to be home renovations. It's nice to be able to see in all of these houses how things work so we can get an idea of what we want in ours. Plus we can also price it all out that way too.

The rest of the afternoon we spent wandering around Seattle, and picking up our race packages for the Seafair race that night, which is what we did Saturday night! The cool part about this race is that it runs part of it along the parade route which is packed with people waiting for the parade to start, so there's lots of people to cheer for you! It's also a pirate themed race, so lots of silly people get dressed up as pirates to run. It was good to get a good run in for the day. On the way home after the race we walked by the beginning of the parade route, so we got to see a lot of the floats and other participants before they started the parade.

After a quick shower we headed back out to the craziness of Seafair in an attempt to get some dinner at 'Serious Pie', Seattle's famous chef, Tom Douglas's pizza place. It just happened to be right on the other side of the parade route, so we scooted across at a break and put our names in for a table. After waiting a few minutes we started hearing cannons going off right outside so we stuck out heads out to watch the rest of the parade which included several floats of pirates shooting off ridiculously loud cannons! I'm sure there were a plethora of less than amused small children who felt the noise was slightly excessive for a nice family event. Luckily there were only a few shot off right by us so it didn't kill our eardrums too badly. Back inside we had a great dinner. The pizza was good, but I must say the highlight of my meal was my amazing root beer float! When I saw it on the menu I knew I had to have it and it completely hit the spot...mmmm tummy love.

Sunday morning Ryan got up bright and early to head off to ride bikes down mountains, which gave me some free time to grab brunch with my favorite Queen Anne ladies, Sarah and Leigha! As much as I'll miss living right down town, I think Queen Anne will be a nice change and I'm eager to get to know all the little local places over there. We also just had a ton of things to catch up on with Leigha's baby news and Sarah just getting back from Paris and our house buying plans! It's so amazing to see how much we've grown up from our little West Middle School selves ;)

Later that afternoon since I had some more free time before Ryan got home, I decided to try out some recipes. I was completely obsessed with the strawberry cupcake I had at the Capital Hill Block Party last weekend, so that was my first challenge to try to recreate. I made angel food cake cupcakes and little whoopie pie wafers and topped/ filled them with a delicious strawberry butter cream. I still think it was pretty amazing, but I probably could have pumped a few more strawberries into it. Either way, I'd say it was a success. As usual with my excessive baking I brought the rest into work so they could get devoured by others before I put myself into a permanent sugar coma. Sad thing is that I set them out when I got to work just after 7am and they were gone in the next 30-45 minutes. Apparently people think cupcakes are an appropriate morning treat! Delish!