Well, hello there, blog’o’mine! Long time, no post! Bet you’re all wondering whether we said “eh, it’s fun here” in Australia and tore up our tickets for the flight home and were living the expired visa life on a beach somewhere.

(Spoiler: no.)

Been a heckuva few weeks (almost months, I guess) since we returned. Figure I’ll throw some highlights at you and we’ll call it even awesome, k?

We’ve seen a couple of concerts, our favourite of which was San Fermin. Oh man, if you ever get the chance….

The Husband’s been busy resuming his aviation-type activities.

And The Girl was officially The Husband’s first civilian passenger!

(I was at home, busy praying.)

We went to see a friend’s school play and I got to relive my Wizard of Oz obsession while reminiscing about how my cute boyfriend (no older than The Girl is here) fed it with gifts galore and tickets to Rainbow Stage.

Our besties came to town and we did the most awesome thing – a Portland food tour! We had beer tastings, local sausage (for the carnivores), food cart fare, New Mexican sopapillas, Indian street food, wine tasting at an urban winery, and fresh blackberry pie for dessert – so amazing!

For Memorial Day (the American “May Long”) we actually headed back to the Motherland and spent a couple of days on Vancouver Island. Not sure which was more exciting – seeing this guy in concert:

Or seeing the World’s Largest Hockey Stick:

(Still a toss-up for me.)

And while the kiddos stayed behind at the hotel and ate food from 7-11 while we were livin’ the dream with Tom Cochrane at the Cowichan Performing Arts Centre, they totes got in on the fun the next day.

Ooooo, look who I found!

Speaking of la famille Trudeau, yesterday we had an epic event at our house – a tea party complete with little sandwiches, scones, cakes, chocolate-covered strawberries, eight teenage hooligans of The Girl’s friends, and a special guest.

(Honestly, this picture makes me cry a bit. That’s my grandmother’s china and I make a point of using it whenever we have guests because she was one of my many inspirations for what it means to be hospitable, and to think that my daughter is using it to show her friends how much they mean to her is so amazing to me and now I am verklempft.)

And that’s pretty much it for us. Of course, there’s the regular stuff like work and school and lawn-mowing and the not-so-regular stuff like hearing aids and dental implants and [insert crisis here] that keeps us busy but isn’t terribly good blog fodder. Portland’s been in the news lately for some pretty awful reasons and sometimes it feels a bit hell-in-a-handbasket-y, but you don’t need me to pile on what you already know. By now you know this blog’s about as interesting as watching me read in my backyard and you come here for a bit of boring normalcy in a pretty crazy world.

Right?