Seattle Shenanigans

I met Kellie Talbot when I was backpacking through Europe in 1994-ish. I was staying at a youth hostel in Paris and I saw her descendng the stairs wearing a Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt I walked up to her and said "Hi - I have the same T-shirt. Such a simple observation started a friendship that remains strong today.

We manage to get together at least once a year - Kellie and her husband John live in Seattle, only a 2.5 hour drive from Vancouver. The visits involve lot's of good food and drink and, more often than not, ridiculous shenanigans.

Kel and I are around the same age, so we have many similar pop culture touchstones (Dinosaur Jr. T-shirts being just one of them). This visit, she busted out her Breyer horse collection. If you were a girl in the 70's, you probably had one of these collectible horses, or wanted one. I only ever had one of these horse figurines, but I would spend hours drooling over the catalogue. So when Kell told me she had about 15 of these horse figurines languishing at her mom's house, I guess I got really excited. Apparently that motivated her to go pull them out of storage... YES!

It was lovely to re-visit these horse figurines, they really are well made and have beautiful details compared to mass-produced plastic toys today. But after the initial awe had worn off, we were kind of like, well, now what do we do with 15 horse dolls?

What indeed? Here's where it started.














And here's (after about 70 photos) where it ended...


Here's a shot of their neighbor's gimpy-cute dog - his name is Dojo (aka Lo-Jo). He's got a regular dog-sized head on a really small dog body.. Plus a backwards leg. He's the sweetest thing.
Kell and John have an open door policy when it comes to local urban wildlife. So the squirrels and blue jays come right in the house to get snacks. This is either "chip" or "chipolina" - I get them mixed up.

Oh. Yeah. And they have a pet duck.