Two highlights of the day so far. First I was in an Apple store way out east in Santan Village, looking at headphones when suddenly a giant light brown spider comes crawling out from under the display racks. It was a good 4" around with it's legs all curled up! I resisted the urge to scream like a little girl, and pointed it out to a nearby staff member, who promptly did scream like a little girl ;-)

Secondly I discovered a cool new English pub called Shakesperes. So far Im liking it, sat here blogging and enjoying a Malibu & coke while waiting for my curry to arrive. If it wasn't sunny and hot outside I could almost be back in blighty...

Later Addendum: The curry was good, really good. Like 'couldn't finish it so got a to-go box for the rest' good, something I never normally do. Yum

We had more friends in town this weekend. It's become a regular trip the last few years for Lane, Tawni, Julie & Gary to all be out here in March to catch a few spring training baseball games, and a welcome sun break from the cold & rain of dear old Oregon & Washington. Luckily Tawni has a house out here too, because our compact & bijou condo definitely wouldn't hold them all!

Saturday we hooked up with Lane & Tawni for a quick hike around Dreamy Draw, where Tawni kicked all our butts by running up the mountain faster then a bionic billy goat. Afterwards we took Lane to the Wildflower Bread Company for lunch, it's rapidly becoming one of our favorite places for cheap but healthy & tasty food. I think Lane would have enjoyed it more if he hadn't recently and repeatedly been spoilt by trips to the excellent Herb Box.

Well it's finally fall here, which means it's cooling down at last. It's under 100º every day so we can get out and enjoy ourselves. We discovered Tempe Marketplace earlier in the week and decided to go back Saturday night and check it out some more. Of course it's basically a mall, but it's a lot better designed then many. There's a really long open area with lot's of restaurants dotted along it, some really nice comfy seating areas surrounded by waterfalls and fire-pits, lots of cool lighting, an art gallery, and right in the middle here, a stage where a live band was playing - you can just see them underneath the giant projection screen on the right. The photo is taken from the upstairs balcony of the Cadillac Ranch restaurant, which was surprisingly good with the one exception of having a poorly stocked liquor cabinet :-)

On a recent trip to Cave Creek, we stumbled dying of thirst into a place called "Hammerhead Jacks Boardwalk Grill and Desert Beach Bar", and what a find it is! Great food & drinks - our recent visitor Lee will be glad to know I managed a foot long hot dog (Lee really wanted to try Alice Cooper's 2 foot long hot dog, ahem!) - and a decor that was like a crazy tribute to the movie Jaws.

Today was our 4 year anniversary - yay! We started our evening by dropping by our new favorite uber-healthy restaurant "Mack Daddies". I know it the name sounds lame, kinda fast food-ish, but it's actually named after the owner, Mack Newton who has trained in the Martial Arts for over 63 years. He was head coach of the USA Taekwon-Do for a few years in the 80's, and 'conditioning coach' for the Oakland A's and Dallas Cowboys and numerous other other sports celebrities. He also loves jazz music and has a great picture on the wall of him getting guitar lessons from George Benson! The food is ridiculously healthy too...

Sunday we majorly learned our lesson from yesterday and crammed as many different friends in as possible :-) We started out by going to the Doug Fir for breakfast with my friends Amanda & Jim. Amanda was in Phoenix visiting us last weekend, but Jim had ripped the tendons in his legs and couldn't come. Sure enough Jim came hopping in on crutches and painkillers, but it was great to see that he's still his usual funny self. They also had a gift for us, a beautiful Vargas print in a delightfully tacky plastic frame that Jim had found at an auction or something. It's one of the nicest gifts I've ever been given ;-)

Saturday ended up being our most depressing day of the whole trip, but we realized in retrospect that it was because it included the least friends spread out through the day. It started out great as Heather cooked us a great breakfast, just ham & eggs, but soooo yummy. It ended good too, but we'll get to that later...

After breakfast we headed downtown. It was still freezing cold and oscillating between rain and hail. I used to love Portland's downtown, but now it seems like half the shops have closed and with the miserable weather everything just looked grey and yucky. We cheered ourselves up with lunch at Rock Bottom before heading up to the 21st/23rd shopping areas. We were going to walk around but we were so cold by now that we just drove down the streets until I saw a cool new store called eccodoma. We checked it out and they had some amazing furniture in there. We ended up buying a chinese painting that we liked, then driving to the nearest UPS store to ship it home to Phoenix. Painting: $80, shipping: $80.56, loathing UPS: priceless ;-)

We flew back to Portland today for our friends Kat & David's wedding. The trip didn't start well. First we had to be up at 5am to get to the airport in time for our early morning flight, then as we pull into the terminal we realize that our tickets say the flight is run by Alaska and United, but Alaska is at terminal 2 and united is at Terminal 4. So we go to terminal 2, park up, try & check in, but there's no record of us! After lots of looking at the computers, this eventually means we should be at terminal 4! Oops.

We arrive in Portland about 10.30am, go pick up the rental car and head towards town. Phoenix was 88 and sunny when we left, Portland is alternatively snowing, hailing, raining or nice but freezing cold. It seems to rotate between any one of these weather settings about every 10 minutes. It kinda makes Phoenix's endless "sunny, hot" seem quite boring by comparison - yay for boring! ;-)

We were staying at Sally's brother Ronnie's house, and after a quick detour to check out Sally's old house (completely unchanged after 3 years!) we picked up Ronnie and the kids and head downtown to Kell's Irish Pub for our first taste of Portland. For me it was the meal I've been missing - Curry & Chips - yum!

After dropping Ronnie & the kids off, we headed back into downtown to meet up with some old friends. First we stopped by the new offices of the company I used to work for. Their new offices are beautiful (congrats guys!) and it was great to see so many of the old faces there and catch up on what's been going on. Thanks to all who gave us a tour or stopped and chatted for a few minutes.

Next we headed over to visit my friend Jim who works for KGW - channel 8 in Portland. He gave us a quick tour round the building, showing us the studios where they film the local news, and many other cool rooms full of all kinds of audio/video technology that I can only dream about owning. I loved it, but I think Sally got a little bored of us geeking out over all the gear :-)

Next we swung by my old place where I used to live, which really hasn't changed much, although the area around it had, lots more high-rise buildings - condos, offices etc then there used to be. Then it was down into Johns Landing to see another place where Sally & I first lived together, and on to the cemetery where Sally's mom is buried.

Then it was back to Ronnie & Heather's place to relax for an hour before heading out to the Arcadia Ballroom for Kat & David's wedding. The wedding was cool, with some great vows and really funny speeches. The best bit for me though was catching up with lots of our old friends who we hadn't seen in a couple of years... and the cake ;-)

My old friend Amanda came to visit this weekend - yay! She was supposed to have her husband Jim with her, but unfortunately earlier in the week Jim had decided that running a 5k marathon, followed by playing a game of soccer, would be a good idea. His legs didn't agree however, and he managed to completely rip the tendons off the bone on one of them - ouch! First Sally's brother Ronnie on crutches, now Jim? What do you Portlanders get up to all winter?

After the hike, Tawni took us all to a great burger joint that we'd never seen before - Greasewood Flat. It's up in North Scottsdale, and while it sounds like the name of an old blues singer, it's actually housed in a 120 year old bunkhouse & stagecoach stop that was on the route between Fort McDowell and Phoenix - now that's some history!