We decided to try Thanksgiving dinner out this year and headed to the buffet at the Snoqualmie Casino just ten minutes from home. The casino opened over a year ago and we still hadn’t tried any of the several restaurants on site. Thanksgiving seems like a good reason to get out of the kitchen at home. What a surprise! A great selection of rather good food. There were the traditional turkey, stuffing, potatoes and gravy, of course. But also potatoes au-gratin, yams, ham, prime rib, and mountains of crab legs. Even pizza. It was good enough that we’re thinking of heading back for Christmas dinner.

I’ve seen these ladies on PBS several times and thought it might be fun to see them in person. It was certainly a lavish production given the smallish setting of Seattle’s Paramount Theater. The sound was excellent, the lighting spectacular. The music was OK but oddly impersonal. It’s definitely a group performance so you don’t get any sense of involvement with the artists; you just kind of watch the spectacle. There’s wasn’t room for a full orchestra so the music was an unusual mix of prerecorded and live sound. I was also disappointed that there was no dancing. All that said, the music was nice especially Enya’s “Orinoco Flow,” “Fields of Gold,” and the one song in Gaelic. Noteworthy, too, was the stupendous work of the group’s two percussionists who played on more than twenty drums, a dozen cymbals and a bunch of other instruments I don’t know the names of. In the end it was a relaxing couple of hours and a good break from our intense weekend of yard work.

I read today that Weyerhaeuser is closing the Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection garden on April 2nd. It’s so sad that these majestic plants –some over 200 years old– will no longer be on display to the public. The Puget Sound Bonsai Association has some photos of these majestic little plants but they are really breathtaking in person. We will miss not being able to visit them occasionally. The good news is, so far, I’ve not heard anything about plans to close the adjacent Rhododendron Gardens.

I’m glad to see 2008 gone. It was a difficult year health wise and my golf game was generally crumby so I’m looking forward to a fresh start. We spent New Year’s Eve in a somewhat unusual way. After a simple dinner at home we attended two tapings of the NPR radio show “Says You!” at Town Hall in Seattle. We listen to the show often and it was great fun to see the panelists in person and watch the production process. We didn’t get back home until after 11:00 so for the first time in many years we were actually awake for the stroke of midnight. After watching the fireworks at the Space Needle on television we’re thinking it might be worth the effort to see them in person next year.

We braved the Seattle traffic and brisk temperatures and were rewarded with a wonderful performance by Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster. We arrived in time for a leisurely beef stew dinner at Puck’s cafe just outside the concert hall and a little Bailey’s on the rocks to boot. We’ve seen Ms. MacMaster before and she was terrific as always. Her energy (including some impressive dancing) was all the more remarkable given that she’s due to give birth to her third child in February. In addition, the accompanying band was also superb, especially piano player Mac Morin and the extraordinary fourteen year old cellist, Nathaniel Smith. I can’t wait to see her again.

We were among the very first visitors on the opening day of the Lucy exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. We were surprised and ultimately delighted with the historical background about Ethiopia and the excellent explanations of the anthropological techniques involved in dating the fossils and determining Lucy’s bipedalism. The bones themselves were absolutely stunning. It’s been thirty-plus years since I sat in the classroom listening to lectures on physical anthropology but I’ve never lost interest in the area and seeing the Lucy fossils up close was a thrilling experience.