NAOBF

Yesterday, after picking 6kg of raspberries in Sauvie Island, we headed to Overlook park in Portland for the North American Organic Beer Festival. It was conveniently located on the yellow MAX line which passes close to our place so we could just ride the tram there, we actually met our friends in the MAX as they had found parking only quite far away.
Like most beer festivals here, the first thing you're being asked before getting in is your ID, if you're over 21 you'll get a bright wristband. The next stop is to buy tokens and a cup if you intend to try the beers. It's 6$ for the cup and 1$ per token which gets you one sample to try (4 tokens get you a full glass). Once our tokens collected, we headed for the shade of a very large tree to study the beer list in order to chose what we wanted to try. The printed list that you get there has more details like a description of the flavors, the ingredients and the level of bitterness on the IBU scale.

Once you've figured out which one you want, you wander around and try to locate where the line for the brewery you're interested in is.

Once found, you wait hoping they don't run out :), or jump to the shortest line and try something random. Once at the counter you hand 1 or 4 tokens to the person that is pouring the beer of your choice, done. As you can see here, "no wristband, no beer"

Overall it was quite nice to hang with friends in a park, trying out new beers and looking at how happy everybody was, listening to the live bands and watching the kids play around even though I preferred the winter beers (our last beer fest was the winter one). Pictures of the happy participants here.
We even got free bread !

Patisserie course

As a wedding present, M got a pastry course at the Oregon culinary institute. She spent Sunday morning baking and baking more. As I had bought nice hood strawberries and raspberries we decided it was time to put her newly acquired skills to good use as well as our newly acquired tart pans.

And yes I had quite some fun playing with the macro lens, the tripod and the remote flash :).

Conference in Chandler, AZ

Last week I spent 2 days near Phoenix, Arizona for a conference. The hotel/resort was located in the middle of the desert so we would be isolated and work all together I suppose :). I found the location to be great and would actually have enjoyed spending more time there.

The hall was quite impressive

The outdoors were nice, a combination of desert, water and cacti, more pictures here. The good news is they didn't try to deport me as it seems to be in fashion over there lately.

Slow 3-days weekend

Saturday around 6 we received a text from Anna asking us if we were coming to a concert with them that night. I answered a "No" for Michelle, to realize 5 minutes later that we might have to change our plans for the night because she had indeed purchased tickets for that concert. Silly me :). Anyway we still had time for our first part of the evening plan: using up our Mc Cormic and Shmick coupons for a nice (free) dinner. We then biked to the Roseland Theater for LCD Soundsystem's concert. While waiting for the show I spotted an upcoming group I really wanted to see, so I started the night in quite a good mood (Tinariwen is coming in 3 weeks and we now have tickets also). We got out all sweaty and tired (i.e. the concert was good :)). This is going to be quite a concert heavy month for us, we're also going to see the New Pornographers and OBT's Bolero, and yes I know that covers quite a wide musical genre spectrum.

We met our usual group of friends Sunday noon for a barbecue picnic at Irving park. It was a nice, slightly rainy relaxed afternoon spent playing Frisbee and chatting around a beer or two. We got back home to have a couple over for an apero; we had discovered about 2 weeks ago that there was a French guy working at Intel that was living in the tower next to ours, so we've been carpooling since and wanted to meet his wife as well.

Monday was mostly about writing thank-you cards: done! We enjoyed the end of the sunny afternoon at the riverfront looking at the 1000 flags that had been erected there for memorial day (Le jour des anciens combatants).

The display was quite moving and the lighting was making it even more dramatic.

The rose festival was also going on this weekend, but considering our poor experience last year we didn't go...