bike ride to magnolia

Here are a few pictures from last Sunday's bike ride to Magnolia! We had so much fun except maybe for the last half hour when we had to trudge up the huge hill to our house. Yes, that was definitely not the most fun, but the rest was great.

We took the Burke Gilman trail to...

the Ballard Locks and then... 

crossed the train tracks into Magnolia where we...

 took a rest at Magnolia park and admired...

the beautiful views and we...

jumped off things and also...

stopped to swing and... 

swing some more before we...

stopped to see the fishing boats and... 

more fishing boats and then we...

took Ship Canal trail home and... 

 it was a good day indeed.

three things I currently love and one thing I hate

1. This shirt was accidentally sent to me by  mistake. When I contacted the company, I was told I could keep it (it's says "Coffee...a hug in a cup")! Love!

2. These flowers randomly decided to start growing at the base of our deck stairs. I have no idea where they came from (squirrels?), but I love them.

3. You can now buy Maddie on Things prints! As I've mentioned before, I love Maddie. I bought this picture for our kitchen, and it is SO cool. Everything about it is perfect. 

However...

I do NOT love the giant hobo spider that decided to crawl across the COUCH and attack me. For a frame of reference, please refer to this picture I took of one a few years ago in our bathroom. Not cool. Soooo...not cool. I refused to get on the couch the rest of the day.

Happy Monday! Hopefully there are no spiders and only free shirts in your day.

fish tips

(pictures by Morgan Keuler for the cookbook)

Happy Friday! 

I have a cool interview to share with you today. Anders was interviewed by Epicurious and then featured in the Huffington Post in their Taste section. In the interview he gives lots of fish tips from how to know if it's fresh to how to store it once you have it home. Check it out! I'm really proud of him!

shrubbery

In which Anders cuts our laurel in the rain while I take pictures instead of help and he doesn't get mad. 

I love him!

macro

For my birthday this year, I bought myself a fun little toy. It's a macro lens for my cell phone camera that sticks to your phone with a magnet. It's the coolest little thing although it definitely takes some practice to get it right. I didn't realize that it requires you finding teeny tiny things to photograph (much smaller that I was even expecting), and it also requires a very very steady hand, which is sometimes hard and frustrating. However, I do love that it makes me look closely at the world. I'm not a very observant person, so it definitely forces me to look at things closely...like the hairs sticking out of moss or the inside of a flower. Here are a few of my favorite I've taken so far.

Happy Memorial Day to everyone! I sure do love three day weekends. We are hanging around the house today; relaxing, doing yard work, planting flowers and grilling. 

winco!

More exciting news from the Fish Market! The guys are now selling Pike Place Fish branded goodies at WinCo supermarkets all across the country (WinCo is a super cool, employee owned grocery store chain). You can find salmon burgers, smoked sockeye candy, spice blends, sauces and their rubs. In fact, the salmon burgers at the store are the exact same recipe of the burgers they sell at the shop (a recipe Anders actually created). Taho and Ryan went down to California to kick off the grand opening and toss fish around the Ventura store! Check out all the pictures here and check out the products in your local WinCo (if it's not there right now, it will be soon!)

(these pictures were taken from the Winco site as well. I wasn't actually there. Still excited, though!)

leavenworth

Anders and I celebrated my birthday this past weekend with a quick, overnight trip to Leavenworth. Leavenworth is this crazy Bavarian themed town in the Cascade Mountains just a few hours outside of Seattle. It doesn't have some impressive story about why it's a Bavarian town...the town just needed a way to make money after their logging boom ended and left them almost a ghost town. They chose a Bavarian theme because German Bavaria has the same alpine terrain, and that's how it turned into a fun little tourist destination. We stayed at the Pine River Bed and Breakfast and really enjoyed our stay. The hotel sits on 22 acres with lots of trails throughout the property, and we had a great time hanging out and relaxing.

(it was so nice of this random, road side, coffee stand to wish me happy birthday!)