Introducing . . . the Hillbilly Golf Champs!

My friends, Heather and Josh and their folks and spouses and kids invited me and Eddie and Scott and his daughter Ashlee to join them for a picnic before the fireworks display on Friday the 4th. After dinner, we played several rounds of hillbilly golf - also known as ladder golf. (See this website for more info - http://www.laddergolf.com/).

For ladder golf, they made a short ladder-looking structure that's about waist-high or maybe a bit higher. You place two of them facing each other at a distance. It has three rungs. Then, you have three short ropes with golf balls attached to each end.

You play with two teams of two people each and each team gets three sets of golf balls. One partner stands at each end (like horseshoes). You hold on to one golf ball and the toss the whole works over to the ladder. If you hit the bottom rung, you get one point, two points for the middle rung, and three points for the top rung. Then, you play to 21 points.

I am proud to annouce that my partner, Scott, and I, beat the other teams 5 games to 1!! HA!!!

Saturday, my folks and Eddie and I headed to Portland and went to Saturday Market and I got a henna tattoo and my son found a really fun cat mask, then we met up with my Aunt Judy and Uncle Dave (Judy's my dad's sister) and then picked up my Auntie Marie (Marie is my mom's sister) and we had dinner at P.F. Chang's, a Chinese restaurant near Powell's Bookstore. The dinner was delicious and we had fun. Then, my folks and Eddie went back to the hotel room and I went to the cocktail party with Scott. I brought them all home again and then went back up to Portland for Andrew's wedding. The wedding was at the Armory (a really nice spot) and dinner was delicious. My dinnermates were Richard Clinton and his wife Caroline and Theresa Hogue (who wrote the GT article about me) and Joseph Orosco. Later Becky Warner and Brent Steel joined our table. The conversation was great. The bride and groom wrote their own vows and they were both touching and funny - Jessica couldn't get Andrew's ring on his finger, so Andrew stuck it in his mouth to moisten it up (whiched worked), then, for good measure, he pulled Jessica ring finger into his mouth to help get her ring on!!

All in all, a good week-end. But I've decided to take it easy today and get caught up on things like laundry, my checkbook, etc. Whew! My son decided to take a mud bath - his third one this summer - not sure why he's fascinated with that at the moment, but he is. As long as he has fun, that's all that counts, right? A bath and sweeping and mopping the floors and spray-and-washing his clothes cleans it all up again!

Oh yeah! In other good news, Josh and Amy had their baby on Saturday night - please welcome Steven Sanford Searles to the world! See the new mama and son - http://s310.photobucket.com/albums/kk436/nonnelb/. He weighted 10 lbs. 1 oz. Good job, Amy!