Life's a Beach

One of the things I love about moving back to the Northwest is the ability to drive a couple short hours in the car and be at the ocean. Eldon suggested going to the coast for the day, and I loved the idea. When I got up yesterday morning, I thought it might be a not-so-great day to go, but we went anyway. It turned out to be absolutely beautiful. Not too hot, but not cold at all. Even the water was somewhat warm.










Wesley loves the beach. His nickname is the LochWes Monster because he looks like a sea monster when he swims. He had the best time chasing the ball through the waves. He doesn't like it when the waves crash into him, so he tries to jump them, and his ball obsession will keep him doing this all day long, no matter how tired he is.

Because we were unsure of the weather, we didn't bother to bring swimsuits... What's the difference between underwear and swimsuits anyway? The water was warm enough to swim in and not too many folks were around, so what the heck, right?








My attempt at looking sexy.....

Foiled by a cold water wave!

Once we were waterlogged and sandy, Eldon wanted some time to sit and reflect. We climbed up on some rocks and just sat, staring at the ocean's crashing waves. I could do that all day long and not get bored. What a beautiful view.





We drove back and attempted to watch Kung Fu Hustle. I managed to watch about the first 45 mins of it before passing out from exhaustion. From what I saw it was pretty funny. I'm really not into kung fu movies, but it was kinda a spoof, so it was amusing. All the moves were done super fast and some of the things they did were totally ridiculous. Even if you're not a kung fu fan, I'd recommend seeing it for the sheer entertainment value. I'll have to watch it all the way through sometime.

The joys of cheap apartment living...

So last night I'm taking my garbage out, and as I'm walking to the dumpster, a cop car drives by me. No problem, till I see that he drives past me and stops next to two other cop cars...
I have no idea what happened, but lets just say this isnt the first time I've seen police vehicles in my complex. As a matter of fact, about two weeks ago, I was walking Wesley outside my apartment, and an officer walks up to me and asks where apartment 57 is. I reply, "Um, well.. I live in 55, which is right there, so I think it's upstairs." He goes around to the front of my building and not long after, they raid that apartment....

Today's special: I'm trying to get my house cleaned because my friend Jesse is flying out from NY to visit me over Labor Day weekend, and although he already knows I'm not the neatest person in the world, I'd like to at least have it somewhat neat when he arrives. So I'm standing in my kitchen when I hear two little kids talking outside my window.

Little girl to little boy: "What's your name?"
Little boy: "Joshua."
Little girl: "Where do you live?"
little boy: "Over there.. Where do you live?" (I assume they're pointing because I'm not looking out the window, I'm just listening.)
little girl: "Who do you live with?"
little boy: "My mom. My dad's in jail."
little girl: "I live with my daddy. I don't have a mom."
little boy: "You have to have a mom!"

Well at least we can assume the kids know a little about human development... at this point I couldn't stomach listening anymore. This reaffirms one of the many reasons I don't have children. It also reminds me that I hate my apartment complex.

Not a lot of excitement at the dog house...

I spent the actual weekend working. Nothing exciting there really. I worked from 11am to 8pm at one job, then came home long enough to let Wesley out, feed him and take a shower before heading to my second job till 3am... Rinse, repeat for Saturday. I missed my weekly lunch Wednesday with Mom due to my brother's car accident (he got rear ended at a dead stop by a tow truck driver going 40, he's ok but his Mustang is totalled. :( So we decided to do it Saturday morning before I went to work. Barely coherant, I went. We went to the Peachtree restaurant on Hwy 99. Their food is very good, but wow do they give you a lot.

I did manage to get a couch! Well of sorts anyway. My mom had an old futon she was going to get rid of, and since the furniture in my house consists of exactly a desk chair and a bed, it was helpful to have. I enlisted the help of Eldon and my brother Brian to lift and transport it into my apartment.

Then Eldon and I went to see The 40 Year Old Virgin. I have always liked Steve Carrell, ever since I saw him on the Daily Show, and his parts in Bruce Almighty and Anchorman, as well as on the show The Office. Although he was the essentially the same guy he is in all of those parts, he's still very funny to watch. There are some really laugh out loud funny parts in that movie. Like where he gets his chest waxed... I think he really did that for the movie for real... "You look like a man-o-lantern!" If you like to laugh at silly, slapstick, embarrassing moment humor, you'd really like this movie. I really did.

Nothing like Dogs and Rawhide.....

I went to work and had such a rewarding day. Thursday nights are my problem child class. I have the SUPER SHY pit bull/lab mix ironically named Shyanne, in the same class as the huge and super OVERREACTIVE rottweiler/shepherd mix also ironically named "Tiny". Those two dogs make the class challenging, not to mention the hyperactive ADD chihuahua, the older black lab, the chicken-killing lhasa apso and the sweet and silly labradoodle. The most rewarding part of my job is that I get to see the dramatic changes in these dogs over the course of 8 weeks of working with them, and tonight after class I heard two of the dog owners remark about how much better the dogs were this week than last week. :)

Then I went out to see the Rawhide Girlzzz at The City. Interesting show. If you've ever seen the movie Coyote Ugly, its kinda like that. Girls dancing on the bar, etc. They did a few routines on the dance floor and then it got really hot.... The girls started doing choreographed routines on top of the bar, and then did body shots off each other! They poured water on each other, which of course got all over us as well. All in all, was a great show to watch.

White Water Rafting Rules! (say that three times fast!)

I had the best time on Tuesday!!!! Other than the fact that we had to get up at the crack of dawn to get out there. The early start started off right. I got up early enough to prepare chili in the crock pot for when we got back, while Abby and Warren went out to get everyone some coffee.
Abby, Me, Ildiko, Brie & Kirsty
Jesse, Eldon & Warren


We all piled into Abby's Tahoe and we drove the 2.5 hours to the Deschutes River to go rafting. Apparently the mosquitos had just hatched a few days ago, so we had to really pile on the sunscreen and bugspray. Heres the prequel to the rafting.....
We bought an underwater camera to use, and we caught a few choice images of the actual trip.

It was Kirsty's birthday, so our awesome River guide Clint, made sure that she was the center of attention by ensuring she got dumped from the boat several times during the trip!

We also did some cool tricks on our raft, like a full on "wheelie" with all of us at the back of the boat and the front of the boat straight up in the air! We also went down some rapids without the boat, and "surfed" with our raft.

It was a fantastic trip. We were there from about 10 am to 6pm.
After the trip, we were completely wiped out, and got a little silly on the car ride home. Here's some random sillyness.






When we finally got back to the house, Eldon and Jesse gave Kirsty a birthday lap dance.

Then it was back to the hot tub because we weren't quite water logged enough.

Slumber Party!

Being that we planned to go rafting on Tuesday, we thought it best if we stayed over night in the same place because we were going to be leaving so early the next morning. I had to work Monday night, but before I went, Wesley and I were already at Eldon's. Eldon said he would be willing to hang out with Wesley at his house while I went to work so he didn't have to take an unneccesary car ride or sit at home alone while I was working. That's the coolest thing ever. I forgot to mention that Wesley met Sebastian... It was a bittersweet meeting. Wesley loves cats, but apparently Sebastian doesn't like dogs.. AT ALL. A staring contest ensued between the two of them....

Sebastian spent the rest of the day pouting in Eldon's bathroom sink, growling every time Wesley came in. Apparently while I was at work though, Wesley made a new best friend in Jesse. They wrestled around and played the whole time I was gone. When I came back, Wesley was riled up to crazyness!

While Abby was exhausted from having to be at work at some ungodly hour like 3am, her and Warren went to bed early, skipping out on the fantastic peach cobbler I made for everyone for dessert when I arrived, but myself, Eldon, Jesse and Ildiko went down to the hot tub to relax before we went to sleep. Jesse, Ildiko and I started laughing hysterically at Eldon, who managed to do a very impressive hobbit impression in the pool, and then tried to pull me in!

I love my Tevas

Sunday I had off from work and I knew I needed to get some new sandals for my rafting trip. As I am vertically challenged all of my current shoes are platforms in some way. Platform sandals don't work too well when walking across rocks, as I discovered when I took Wesley to Sunset Falls. Wesley and I took a trip down to Beaverton to hang out with Eldon, and we went to REI. By the way, REI is super cool.. Not only do they allow dogs, but this ultra cool sporting goods store also sells dog toys! Tevas seem to be the popular brand of sandals out here, although living on the east coast for 5 years I had never heard of them until I came back here. I saw lots of people wearing them and always thought they looked cool.
I only have one complaint about these super cool sandals..... The ones I liked were $25.00 MORE in the women's size than they were in the mens, for EXACTLY the same friggin design~! What's up with that??? Luckily, I have pretty big feet for a girl, and the smallest size they carry in men's is just perfect size for me! So I bought the men's. :P Eldon liked them so much, he bought a pair for himself too.


After that, I was ravenously hungry. We went to Old Chicago, a pizza restaurant near his house. We ordered a small pepperoni pizza AND meals on top of it. Their chicken fetuccini alfredo is fantastic! So was their hard pear cider.



Finished up the night watching In Good Company. While I liked the fact that it had a realistic ending, it wasn't all that great of a movie. It was one of those movies I could have seen or not seen and not been disappointed either way. I like Topher Grace and Scarlett Johanssen though, so I watched it for them, but all in all it was sorta boring. The best part about the movie I think was the fact that I was IN good company when I watched it.

It's definately a full moon....

I don't even know how to begin to explain it, but I am a firm believer that the full moon does make people crazy. I saw some things tonight that scared me, as well as some things that were just bazarre.
In addition to that, I felt completely off today at work. The only cool thing that I can say came out of today, was that there was an inexplicable amount of Weimaraners around. I saw 4 other Weims today other than my own. That had to be the best part of my day.
Maybe I'm just biased, but all the weims I saw today were'nt as good looking as my Wesley though. I'm sure I'm biased, but one of them, Nicholas was his name was ENORMOUS! One female was overweight, and I hate that, because weims look terrible when they're fat. They don't have much hair to cover up their figure so it's blatantly obvious. The other two I saw were like 9 mos and 1 year and they were very pretty dogs, but they were completely out of their mind! I'm convinced I have the best dog in the world.

New Duds and Old Friends.

Today my mother and I finally got together to go clothes shopping for my birthday. She said she felt it was more personal to do something like that rather than just give me money. Although I probably could have used money more, I haven't bought a stitch of new clothing in ages, so this was equally as great a gift. We went to the Burlington Coat Factory. To my surprise they had some really cute clothes there. Silly me, I thought they just sold coats. We could only do it on my mom's lunch break, so it was almost like a timed shopping spree. Speed shopping was fun! I just grabbed a bunch of stuff I liked, not looking at prices, barely pausing to ensure the sizes were right and took a zillion hangers into the dressing room. Tried everything on, found a bunch of stuff I liked and came out. We were done in an hour. She also bought me a sandwich and said goodbye. I like my mom in small doses. The one hour shopping spree was just the right amount. Plus my mom is kinda a milf, so she does know how to dress.

I then spent some time figuring out my college mess. Come to find out I'm too late to get into the program, and they have closed admission to it till next May! It made me want to beat my head against my desk, but I'm sure I'll figure out something to do in the mean time. I'm just kicking myself for not finishing when I was in PA. Things would be so much different if I had. Ah well... such is life.

Then it was off to work with 3 puppies and 5 adult dogs at work.

After work, I finally got in contact with my old high school buddy Chris. We went to the Arnada Cafe in downtown Vancouver for a few drinks, some really bad pool against his friends Nate and Orlando, and then I proceeded to school him at Ms. Pac Man. Good times!
Chris is going to totally kill me for posting this old pic from back in the day....

Back to Reality

After my crazy "weekend" (which happens to fall on a Tuesday)... it was time for me to go home and get some stuff done. I did manage to make it to lunch with my mother, as per the agreement set forth upon my arrival to the northwest.

We went to Izzy's. For those of you who don't know what Izzy's is.. it's a pizza place, but it also has a really great buffet bar and salad bar.

I completely gorged myself on salad, different types of pizza, fried chicken, and some really great garlic noodle things, while showing my mom, her husband and my little brother (he's 19, so not so little) the videotape of our destruction of watermelons and electronic equipment. Needless to say, my brother thought it was cool, my mom and her husband didn't really get why it was so fun. /shrug. Because I've been spending so little time at home, I haven't really had the chance to do things like clean my house.

I managed to get some dishes done though!

Pool Party!

After a long day in the sun blowing stuff up, we decided to go play in the pool.
The other people at the pool must have thought we were drunk with as silly as we were being. Some games of Chicken ensued, as well as random bouts of throwing each other into the pool. some really bad Unsyncronized swimming and being silly.

Do you hear the "Friends" theme song?

Poorly synchronized swimming.....

3, 2, 1, Liftoff!

Pool Chicken is always fun!

And finally, relaxing in the hot tub to finish off the day.

Blowing stuff up is FUN!

Tuesday we decided to go shooting. Myself, Eldon, Warren, Abby, Brie, Jesse and Ildiko gathered up food, and toys (ready guns and ammo) and headed out to a spot off HWY 26 to go blow some stuff up. Literally.

Warren cleaned the guns while we supervised.

Wesley the gun dog.

Jesse stocking up on propane...

Part 1 of our arsenal.


Part 2 of the arsenal.

My computer monitor died a few weeks ago, and my friend Matt gave me one that I can use till I can afford to buy a new one. Being that the old one was dead beyond repair, I decided to ensure it was dead, and we brought it to the range with us to blow it up. :) Being that I brought it, I was allowed the first shot.


Fun with handguns

Guns = penis extension for 20something males.
And now for photos of the destruction that ensued from our aim.....