So much to say...

Hello again!

November is flying by; quite a bit to report.

First, I finally made it to the Japanese Garden, which I had been planning to do for quite some time. They had free admission on Veteran's day, so I grabbed my camera and waded through the puddles...












This was one of a number of bonsai trees on exhibit, sort of a hybrid-looking one. My mother's words kept echoing through my head "Don't these people have anything better to do with their time than make trees small?" but I enjoyed the exhibit nonetheless.









Next Dan's father came to visit for the weekend..our first overnight visitor!! It was really fun to have him here, we got to see some new parts of Portland and he came out to this area for the first time (a prior trip having been cancelled due to the eruption of Mt. St. Helens!)

We went to the Rose Garden, but we saw more leaves than roses:









We also took a trip to the Oregon Zoo:
(this next pic dan said was a must-have for the blog)












And this is a shot of dan hypnotizing a penguin. It must have been a trained penguin because dan's dad first attracted it with his umbrella, then dan had it following his camera cord back and forth across the window.

humane? no. fun? yes.









(side note related to penguins: we (Dan, myself, and my way-cool friend from work Kim) went to the Omnimax theater at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, or OMSI as people here refer to it (pronounced AAHHHM-see) to see Happy Feet, the movie about the dancing penguins. We went because Dan's best friend Dave worked on the film these past few months and also we wanted to see OMSI and the OMNIMAX theater they have. WOW! It was really cool. The theater was cone-shaped and for the first few minutes was disorientingly realistic. We got used to it after a while, but it was still really huge and fun! And at the end, we watched the credits and gave Dave a standing ovation. That was the best part.)