Sokol Blosser Holiday Party

Tonight was fabulous!  Eddie and I began our evening with a picture-taking spree on the waterfront by our apartment.  We decided to send out Christmas cards this year - first time ever - so we wanted to take some fun pictures.  We donned our Santa hats and snapped a few nice pictures along the river.  After all this it was time for us to get in the car and head out to wine country for Sokol Blosser's holiday party.  We were sidetracked in Tigard where we saw this fun Blues Brothers & Santa display in a shopping center parking lot.  I had to beg Eddie to let us stop and take pictures and he finally relented.  I'm happy because this turned out to be one of my favorites, but it did not make the cut for our cards.  :-(  Oh well.  It's still a fun picture.

Lauren did an excellent job planning the party at Red Ridge Farms in Dayton.  Chef Paul had a beautiful assortment of food treats for us to snack on (I had bread & toast) and of course we had excellent wines on hand.  After dinner we had a fun white elephant gift exchange.  Even though I do not work for the winery, Eddie said I could participate so I wrapped up a $10 one-month Netflix subscription certificate.  I thought that was a decent gift, but Eddie's was cooler.  He found this awesome set of Nerf dart guns which were highly coveted during the night.  My original gift of "How to be a Ninja" cards was stolen from me, so I chose the gift that I assumed had to have been wrapped by Jenny - it was wrapped in plain brown paper but had a lovely bow hand drawn on the front.  Inside were two bowls that she handcrafted from records at home.  I thought they were very cool and already Eddie and I have plans to use them for an Earth Day / recycling party.  I haven't participated in many white elephant gift exchanges over the years, but I must say this was definitely the best one.  There were just enough gag gifts to keep things funny and a lot of randomly good gifts.

What's the best way to keep the party going after that kind of gift exchange?  You bust out the karaoke machine.  Eddie and Brooke kicked it off with their rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody."  I'm still speechless from his performance.  Luckily I have his awesome air guitar solo on video...

People started clearing out pretty early - it was a weeknight after all.  But Eddie and I weren't done having fun so we decided to hang out with Lauren and Scott for a bit.  We met for a round of drinks at Voodoo Martini in Newberg.  Eddie put some good songs on the juke box and we had a fun time hanging out and winding down.

And that concludes my fun-filled day.  Speaking of conclusions...  Today's media mention comes from the season finale of the last bad summer TV series I have been saving to review.  I finally got around to watching the Royal Pains finale - only to discover that season 3 will begin sometime in January.  Guess I don't have that long to wait for it.  Though I don't know that I'll really be interested in continuing with the story since it has gotten really hokey.  I'm used to Hank having to MacGyver his way through medical emergencies, but usually viewers only need to endure one of these scenes per episode.  This finale had two of those scenes in the first fifteen minutes.  A little overboard if you ask me.  Hopefully they can tone some of that down for season three.  I am curious to find out what's going to happen with Henry Winkler's character.