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...

Twitch, twitch

In less serious news, I am currently working on the most embarassingly bright set of footwear I have ever seen.

Yes, I noticed the colors were pretty bold when I bought the skein, but I figured they'd spread out a little once I started knitting. And, just in case, I settled on a nice, simple pattern, as the rainbowness of the yarn was probably statement enough. Unfortunately, any efforts I made just resulted in brigher socks. Gah. I may have to go on an anti-convulsive while I work on these.



Will I finish them, though? Yes. Because, so help me, I am no quitter. Will I wear them, though?...okay, yes. Because I probably was fairly uncool to begin with. And, as it turns out, this spastic bundle of craziness actually makes pretty soft socks.

We'll take it

Today's field trip was to just outside of Mt. Rainier National Park. I drove down there this afternoon at the request of my mom, to check out/photograph the cabin she'd booked for when my family comes to visit this summer. The place was PERFECT; close to the park but tucked far enough back to be quiet, with enough space for me, too, if scheduling allows at work and I can join them (Crossing fingers. All of them.) It was enough to get me pumped, even though the visit is still weeks away and I still have no idea as to when I'll meet up with them and where [insert anticipatory happy dance here].

As I was driving away from the mountain, it occurred to me when I'd last been there. It was a year ago, almost exactly. I was just finishing up college, and was pretty shaky as to whether or not I had chosen the right job for the following job for the next fall; whether I was ready to or even could become an RN (boards were still to come), whether I was cut out for this whole real world adult thing. My mom, who along with my dad, two sisters, and our neighbors were in town to watch me graduate, had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and at that point, we weren't even sure what stage her cancer was at, let alone what her treatment plan was or how intense it would be. Not to steal any thunder from Mom (I think we can all agree that she had a Bigger Thing to overcome between the two of us), but we both survived.

The cabin manager looked at me a little strangely today as I tried to explain that, no, I wasn't shopping around for a place for the family to stay; we planned on keeping our reservation, we were just all very excited. This will be the post-chemo/radiation/"year of shit" my mom warned me was coming when she told me she had cancer...vacation, and the mere fact that we've all made it to this point healthily and in one piece is something to celebrate. The cool cabin in the woods is just an added bonus.

I acknowledge that life isn't going to be perfect from now on; Mom will have follow up for years, and who knows how long it's going to take for me to feel like a confident experienced nurse. Still, it's always a pleasant surprise when those "Wow. We've gotten this far." moments hit. At the very least, they put things in perspective.

Things I've been up to:

An account of how I've been spending the last few weeks, as told by my camera.
All shots were taken by yours truly, unless they feature yours truly, in which case they were taken by my good buddy Peter (Thanks, Peter!).

When I'm not here (yes, sadly, I can see where I work from my front door),
I've been drinking a lot of coffee.


Maybe too much.




I've been hanging out with friends.




I've been knitting, of course.


And meeting the Yarn Harlot...


...as well as the inhabitants of the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium.


I've been taking roadtrips to Ellensburg with my cousin...


...and going for walks in the woods...

...but I haven't been doing much of the responsible adult stuff. You know, like cleaning my apartment, filing away papers, solidifying my work schedule. Maybe in the next post.

What doesn't kill us...

Though it frequently works out this way, I still don't cease to be amazed by how educational a lousy period in one's life can actually be. This week, which was lousy for any number of reasons, I learned not only that it is possible to function on three hours of sleep a night and that few things feel better on an empty stomach than black rice pudding, but that I am even more like my father than previously thought.

Aside from a last name, workaholism (if that's not a real word, I just made it one) and large eyebrows, my dad and I also apparently share the same stress response. When something particularly horrendous goes down, we'll both let it run around our brains so much that the rest of our bodies, namely our stomachs start to follow suit (thus the pudding). This week, I, the healthy 23-year-old graduated to the same gastric reflux medication regimen as my 57-year-old father. Aren't we cute.

What's a little cooler though (and much less embarassing) is how similar our coping mechanisms of choice are. When things got significantly more stressful in his life this year, my dad, the good Catholic, started praying the rosary much more frequently. He keeps one nearby when he sleeps and gets through at least a decade (one loop around the beads) when he runs each day. While I'll admit that I haven't prayed the rosary nearly as recently as my dad has, I do knit, and pretty obsessively when the rest of my day has been crappy. During the last seven days of craziness, if this gives you any idea of the scale of things, I knit an entire 5ft by 2ft shawl. There's a pretty big gap between knitting and praying, I know, but here's the thing: In a talk I went to last week, I learned that repetitive, relaxing activities such as meditation, praying the rosary and knitting can increase the length of time that theta waves are present in the brain. Theta waves are the ones our brain produces when we're daydreaming; our normal self-criticisms and internal censors turn off, and we're more likely to let ideas flow. This is why people feel like they come up with their best ideas right before they fall asleep, for example. And if you're in the middle of a stressful situation, getting yourself into theta state can help you work through whatever's going on in your head without giving yourself massive gastric reflux. My dad and I were dealing with the shittier parts of life in the exact same way, and we didn't even realize it.

Granted, stumbling upon this information isn't going to fix whatever my dad or I may be going through, but when outside forces already have you feeling crazy enough, it is nice to discover that the way you're responding isn't so far-fetched. It may even bring us closer, assuming we each survive this. Thanks for the worry-genes, Dad.