Day Three

"Hurricane" Ike

Much of my last few days was spent on odd jobs: disassembling patio furniture, securing potted plants, making sure there was enough food in the house, practically raiding Barnes and Noble for sufficient reading material. All for Hurricane Ike, the worst of which was supposed to hit San Antonio today.

This is what we got instead. See that little patch of rain to the right? Yeah. That never actually made it to our house. The most we got was the occasional burst of wind and an increase in already unbearable mugginess. If it hadn't ended in such a cool sunset, I'd be much more bitter about the whole ordeal. Man, did I miss how huge and colorful Texas skies could get. Still, all the furniture. I moved ALL the furniture...

Day Two

Patio lights, Beto's Comida Latina, San Antonio, TX

Tonight, I took the girls out for quesadillas and a live performance by The Tim and Bob Show. The band is comprised of my writing mentor, one of the actresses from the first play I worked on in San Antonio and their spouses, all of whom have become like extended family over the 7/8 years I've known them. I try to catch a show as often as I can when I'm in Texas. It's one of those things that really makes me feel like I'm home.

Day One

In an attempt to resurrect this journal and to stave off any boredom that may arise from spending two weeks in Texas (largely in an empty house with my parents' dogs), I've decided to aim to shoot and post a photograph a day. If it ends up being slower here than I expect, be warned that you're in for a good dozen posts about Japanese Chins, but, in any event, it'll get me blogging again.

Day One

This is my neighbor's dog, who shall remain nameless because I don't actually know what his name is. The main form of entertainment today was watching this bugger go flat out crazy as my parents' slightly spastic new rescue Chin, Josh, ran back and fort in front of him on our side of the fence. Yes. Thursday was that much of a party.

Stars, stripes and band-aids

Happy Fourth, everyone!

I plan to celebrate mine by waking small children up at regular intervals, and most likely eating my own weight in various flavors of hospital ice cream. How about you?

Back in the land of the living

Man, when I start making up for weeks of work craziness/travel/hardly seeing anyone ever, I guess I don't mess around. Aside from sleeping, I don't think I've been in my house for more than an hour at time since Thursday. A quick multimedia recap:

After taking Thursday afternoon to recharge (and even then I did a couple of laps around Greenlake, overdosed on coffee and stayed up way too late getting sucked into the first season of Alias) I got up bright and early Friday morning and ran to Matthews Beach. The weather was way too gorgeous for its own good, so I decided to ditch my errand running plans and just spent most of the day outside. From there, it was off to Third Place Books for a Write Club meeting, (where I FINALLY got to catch up with my writing buddies, and actually may have gotten a usable text chunk or two from the writing exercises we did), and then over to Peso's in Queen Anne for vanilla screwdrivers and lively conversation with newer buddies.

Of course, I still had night shift in my system at that point, and was up until nearly 2, in spite of the fact that I needed to be up bright and early Saturday morning to clean my apartment, grab coffee at Zoka with some friends from Ravelry go back to my apartment and pack a lunch in time to be picked up for a Beer Meetup at Skookum Brewery in Arlington. This was definitely worth the travel time (which honestly wasn't as long as I'd anticipated), in terms of both the beer and the company.

I was a little sad the brewery was open for so short a time that day, though it did put me back in Seattle with time enough to change and grab a snack before catching a showing of Wall-E (whcih was pretty clever, by the way. Granted, I'm mostly just a little kid in a big kid's body, but I enjoyed it) with a friend and then jetting back across town to catch up with other friends/former neighbors for a late dinner.

Today started out with coffee and donuts at Bauhaus, followed by a quick jog down the hill to Westlake center, where I met up with the old neighbors and co. for the Pride Parade. It was TOASTY out, but everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and I was able to get a fun picture or two (with the full effect on display at Flickr).



The parade started to wrap up just in time for me to make it to a Coffee Meetup at Revolutions in Greenlake, which ended up being pretty relaxing in spite of the average caffeine intake.


Got to squeeze in half a Greenlake walk (because, really, to not do a lap around Greenlake proper when you're in that general area on a gorgeous day would just be sad and wrong) before a movie (today's feature was Wanted. Hoo boy! What a rush!)/popcorn-for-dinner night with one of the ex-neigbors and her girlfriend. And...exhale.

I don't know whether to be excited or scared about the fact that I still have three more days in my chunk of time off. I wish I could take some comfort in the fact that I don't have any major plans for those days, yet, but then I didn't have very many solid plans when I was heading into the first three. Oh well. A month's worth of social life condensed into seven days is better than no social life at all, right? Only one way to find out...

Yarn Karma

See that cute little old lady standing between me and my mom?
Yeah, watch out for her. Because in reality, she's only smiling that nicely because she's sure that, any second now, I will drop that scarf that's wrapped around my shoulders and it will be HERS.

The Scarf of Rage (shortened from its project title of Pure Unadulterated Neopolitan Rage, for those who have access to Ravelry and want the full backstory) actually turned out to be quite the success, with several people asking where I'd gotten it and if I was in the mood to make another. This continues to surprise me, considering the original was spawned from 6 particularly craptastic days I had last spring. The scarf project was supposed to act purely as stress relief; any end products would be an extra bonus. And it worked; I did feel infinitely better after cranking out a five foot mass of wool/silk blend. I just didn't expect to have my Great Aunt Anne following me around my cousin's bar mitzvah when I wore it in public, shouting over the music as to how pretty it was, and oh, wait. What? Had I made it for her?! How sweet! We couldn't drop the subject until I promised to make one for her as soon as I got home.

So my mission for tonight is to make decent headway on this guy:



which will probably be dubbed the Scarf of Joy (or something equally as cheesy). I'm trying to finish it up as quickly as the last one, as Anne seemed to be pretty serious about her own shoulder covering being the only thing standing between her and finished object theft. As I left the b'nei mitzvah afterparty, the last thing she said to me was, "You're going to have a lot of happiness in your life soon, sweetie. I can just feel it. Oh, and don't forget about that scarf!" I'm sure she meant for the two comments to be taken in separately, that the completion of Scarf #2 has nothing to do with my future happiness. That'd just be silly, right?

Still, today was an awfully nice day...better make tonight a high caffeine/knitting productivity night. Can never be too careful.

Ever the punctual one

Happy Day-After-Summer-Solstice, everyone!

I celebrated yesterday night by staying over an extra four hours after my regular work shift, which ended up keeping me at the hospital for 17 hours, in total. Fittingly, it felt like the longest day of the year.

So, wow. As per usual, it's been a busy month (or so). I spent a long, relaxing week of it here:


And I do mean literally here, on the couch on the screened-in porch attached to my aunt and uncle's lake house in South Carolina. A couple of my cousins were celebrating their b'nei mitzvah (mitzvot?) nearby, creating the perfect opportunity to catch up with family and take some time off. If I wasn't with someone vaguely genetically related, I was reading "outside" and drinking my own weight in coffee. A girl could get used to this.

Back in Sea-town, it's on to wedding/birthday/visitor season. I turned 24 during the South Carolina visit, and am holding my celebratory horses until the family comes to visit in July (minus one sister, who will be doing theatrestuff in Chicago that week and can't come. My heart breaks for her). Somehow, during all the years we lived here, my dad, who also has a summer birthday, never made it to the top of the Space Needle, so when they're in town we'll all head up to the Needle restaurant to make up for lost time. I'm pretty excited about said visit, and am especially interested to see how well five grown people will actually fit into my tiny tiny apartment. This will be an adventure.

Wedding-wise, a good friend of mine from nursing school got hitched recently, as well (in town, thankfully. I feel like a lot of people have been picking obscure matrimonial locations that I can't get to recently. Am I THAT rowdy of a party guest?). The reception was great; very sunny, very chill, very fitting for the two of them (and everyone in attendance was very photogenic). It was a happy day.



In other happy news (which I don't have a corresponding photo for, sadly), I found a home for those crazy crazy socks I was working on. Turns out, my mom was planning on giving my younger sister a pair of bright green sneakers for her upcoming birthday and (gasp!) the socks matched perfectly. What was said sister's favorite part of said socks, you ask? The brightest neon yellow parts, of course. Those strobe lights-turned-footwear were meant for her; I just didn't know it yet when I first cast on.

Okay, enough ketchup for one day. Guess I'll go back to occasionally nodding off while watching Intervention reruns for fun and profit. Gotta love being on call. Who knows? Tonight just might end up feeling as lengthy as the one before...