Yay Little Brother!

Little brother came up for the weekend to visit! He got in Thursday late at night and he's our first official overnight visitor in our new house! We spent the day Friday wandering around our little neighborhood and seeing the sights like this little park that overlooks Seattle. Friday night we went out to a charity masquerade. It was for Urban Artworks, an organization that Jordan's sister in law (and fellow Seattle architect) volunteers for. It was so much fun to have a fancy little night out. The masks were all made by the kids that are part of the program and some of them were completely awesome. I loved mine! They also had great food and wine and entertainment for the night. For the charity part, there were several tables set up with donated items for auction. We went around a put our names and bids on a few items. As the night went on we updated our items a few times, but only ended up winning one of them. We got a set of super awesome down pillows!! Jordan went away with a pretty sweet photo he bid on too, so we were all big winners for the night! At the end of the night they also had a live auction which was super intimidating. Unfortunately all of those items were waaaay out of our price range so we didn't participate. There were some pretty sweet steals though for those people who did win. We finished out the night with an ice cream stop at Molly Moons on the way home...yumm!

Saturday we put Jordan to work on the house. It was super awesome for him to volunteer to help us out because a few of the things definitely require a couple of guys with actual upper body strength. We mostly just did demo and clean up work tearing down the back potting shed outside of our bedroom. After all the help this weekend, we're about halfway done tearing it down and a ton of the extra construction debris has been disposed of. It was huge progress for the weekend, thanks little brother!!

[before]

[after]

[loading up a truck of trash] 

Saturday night we hung out with Jordan's sister and brother in law again. They had us out to dinner at their house and it was super delish! Good work on that one Matt! I had told them I would bring over the dessert for the night so I gave a cake roll my first try (chocolate strawberry)! Unfortunately I only have a picture of the last remaining slice of it. I think it ended up tasting really good and maybe even better the next day when the last slice was devoured, but there were a few things I would change for next time. I think I ended up cooking the cake a couple of minutes too long so it was a little too dry to roll well. It cracked a couple of times, but looked fine after the frosting went on. Also the filling I used was a plain vanilla recipe but I added strawberries to it so I think it made it too runny and not fluffy enough so the layers were pretty thin. Either way it was yummy and I'll definitely be up for trying a cake roll again. They're so fancy looking and something different from normal desserts.

We finished out the night with a few bottles of wine and a game of trivial pursuit...which quite frankly I was pretty impressed that we were even able to get a winner with trivia questions from the 80s! It was a fun challenge though!

Sunday after a little brunch at a local hot spot up the road we got in a little more work around the house. I can't even tell you how much better the back of our house looks now! We would have kept going with the demo work but the trash truck that we were filling up got a little too full so we decided to call it a day after that. With a few hours to spare before Jordan had to get to the airport we got all packed up and headed out for some wine tasting! We hit up 2 wineries and tasted some delicious wines. A nice was to relax before we had to drop of Jordan at the airport and send him home! I hope we get some more visitors soon and I definitely need to start planning our next SF trip to see everyone again! Love my family!

[Novelty Hill Winery] 

[Mark Ryan Winery]