gl.

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Monday, August 03, 2009

 
11:18 PM: while i'm still 35 [#] [2]

tomorrow's my birthday (which i share w/ gerrie, maggie & obama!) and i still have to write about wisconsin. in the meantime, here's what i've been up to since returning from our 3-week long road trip:

* surviving the heat wave: i wait anxiously for the pacific northwest summer and most of the time it's simply glorious. however, we do find ourselves in hot weather occasionally, and like the snow, portland is ill-prepared to deal with it because hardly anyone has air conditioning (including us). so a whole week of heatwave was pretty crippling (as bonnie said, you had to stay inside almost like you were snowed in). i got through it by using a complex system of opening/closing the shades & windows, putting my hair up, drinking homemade iced chai tea lattes & homemade lemonade, wrapping a wet cloth napkins around my neck after letting them chill in the freezer, and when it got to 106 degrees, i kept my feet in a tub of ice water.

* biking: i was housetending for pdxmph and was happy to use it as an excuse to ride rose (thanks for chocolate-covered cherries, too!). i attached a cupholder to rose and have already broken it just by pressing against it, but sven modified rose's baskets so they'd stop drooping from the weight of the battery and scraping against the fender/wheel. rose lost a whole lot of her native domed hex nuts for no good reason, so we had to replace them with less spiffier ones. i took a bike safety class from the ebike store, which i enjoyed primarily to be with the company of other ebike owners. i had to bike late at night because of the unusual heat (biking with the breeze was cooler than being inside the stuffy house or even outside with no breeze). one night i found an easy route to clackamas town center so later i biked to rei to get my bridgepedal vest & explored the new renovations (the sidewalks are so shiny!). i had several weird bike interactions this week (a woman at the bike rack yelling at daughter, a man asking weird questions about rose at target, a family sitting with their grill in the middle of the path at raymond park at 10pm). i also got squeezed between a driving car and a parked car on holgate. when he stopped to drop off someone off, i stopped to talk to him. he seemed initially reluctant to talk to me, but when i told him i was scared he took it well and we parted amicably.

* eating: when we got back from wisconsin we wanted to get chinese & watch bablyon 5 (ala lily allen), but the "lucky corner" chinese restaurant down the street from us remodeled and drastically changed their menu so that there were no vegetarian options for sven. fortunately pho van is as delicious as ever. michaelmas found a cheap & delicious savory pie shop on 23rd and a new frozen yogurt place for us to try. sven & i went to ping for the first time and i had a really wonderful "african chicken" dish. i also lovelovelove their drinking vinegars. i've been using the hot weather as an excuse to visit dutch bros coffee, who conveniently sent us a slew of coupons i've been using on dutch freezes. dutch bros is a straight shot down 136th and seems to be the replacement for our much beloved coffee people.

* stargazing: well, not too much of that, strangely enough, though july was an excellent month for iss watching thanks to @twisst. i also finally got my galileoscope (!!!), which i plan on setting it up later this week.

* entertaining ourselves: sven & i saw quantum of solace, which i liked less than casino royale. we also saw the movie "moon" at fox tower, which i quite enjoyed. we saw one of the last of the amok time trek-in-the-park plays and afterwards had dinner w/ bridget & darren -- which was apparently so much fun we missed the beauty salon explosion and fire down the block. i've been delighted to return to my sunday farmer’s market routine, though i was crushed to find that lilikoi will be moving to a mississippi site since lents is still so slow. (lilikoi makes fabulous kalua pork wraps. i really want more food vendors there!). michaelmas & i went to saturday market to celebrate the beginning of our relationship 11 years ago (though rob bowman introduced us in 1996!). we saw a bagpipe player on a unicycle and i found my favorite new skirt at shabbyknapsack. i also popped over to mt. tabor's 100th anniversary and plein air exhibit. sven & i attended anna’s fortuitous 40th birthday party: we had a pretty good time for a couple of introverts, playing bocce, volleyball, and tarot.

[amok time: oh, iphone, how i wish you had zoom. and that we had gotten there 20mins earlier.]
[my tarot reading at anna's fortuitous 40 birthday party]
* working: i prepped and taught a new class: creative business identity. it went really well, though i had a question at the end that threw me for a loop. also, it's worth mentioning that it looks like i'm in the market for a part-time job again. i'm not in a rush and am pretty open to the field, though my ideal job is something low-key and/or in the reproductive health/counseling areas. please keep me in mind! :)

Comments:

Happy Belated Birthday!

Drinking vinegars sound intriguing. As a child, I used to love to drink the Easter egg dye water after we were finished decorating, but I'm sure real drinking vinegar would be much better, plus it has the advantage of not having dye in it!

We've been hearing about the heat wave y'all had -- can't imagine having those temperatures without a/c!

myled -- captcha of the day -- speaking of captcha, I've run into some on other sites that seem to have you actually proofread text -- some characters so indistinguishable that I just type in random letters and I still pass! This must be "proofreading by consensus," perhaps?

# posted by  susanbrown : Sat Aug 08, 10:32:00 PM PDT

 

hey, susan, thanks! drinking vinegar is MUCH better than easter dye, i think. ;) sweet & sour at the same time: like an italian soda but with a little sharpness.

the weather is back to beautiful. i don't mind suffering here as long as it's just once a summer. :)

allodi: a west london greeting.

# posted by  gl. : Tue Aug 11, 12:11:00 AM PDT

 

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