Just Too Much for an Introvert

I found this flower on a trash heap today. I like to think the garbage men found it and smiled
before throwing the trash away. I don't think they noticed.

I do believe the stars have been aligning oddly in Capricorn this week.

Aside from other odd interactions I've found myself engaging in that I am still working to put my head around (randomly being contact by someone 8 years past, talking with an ex-boyfriend for a long while in a car smelling of raspberries, meeting new people and nearly immediately deciding to live with them, betting a 6-pack of microbrew on the location of Glacier Peak), I was hit on in a local coffee shop today.

My lab partner and I met up to study for our lab quiz and prepare for our class. We stayed at the coffee shop for about three hours until we finally needed to go to class. While my friend was in the bathroom, the guy sitting next to me leaned over, slipped me a piece of paper and wished me luck on my test. Shocked, I wonder if he in fact dropped the paper off at the right table and that perhaps I should place it at a table with a more desirable female inhabitant.

It was pouring down an August rain and my friend and I waited until we got to my car to open up the paper and see what Mr. Coffee Shop had to say. It had a number and a note apologizing for the passive method of delivery; wondering if I could pretend he gave it to me outside the shop instead. I'm not the sort of girl to attract phone numbers and am left wondering,

1. Does he give his number out to everyone?
2. In a moment of nervousness, did the note in fact make it to the wrong table?
3. Did he listen in on our conversation for three hours to decide that I was interesting enough to receive his number?

Baffled, I don't know what to do with the note. I go between taking a picture of it and posting it on my blog to hanging it on the refrigerator. Maybe I'll call it eventually, but I don't remember what the giver looks like as he was sitting next to me and didn't do much to attract attention. If he brings any other book besides Moby Dick to a coffee date, I really wouldn't be able to pick him out of a crowd.

This has been a very stressful and confusing week for a borderline introvert dealing with reclusive tendencies. I feel just about ready to quit this socializing thing.

Art Therapy

Inspired by my recent move to Seattle and fueled by my lack of employment, I'm caught with an irresistible need to cut, color and hang little bits of paper from odd places. My projects for the summer have been decoupaging an old copy of Vanity Fair to a dresser (project pending), making the perfect bookshelf (pending), coloring and sending as many envelopes as I can to friends and family (pending), painting a mirror (pending), and hanging little paper flowers all over the place (finished). My completion ratio is not looking so great, but the projects keep me busy while I search for employment. I'll be moving again at the end of this month, so hopefully that will give me the revived energy to finish things I start.

Yesterday, my roommate put a name to this obsession that made me feel only slightly less crazy: Art Therapy. In the best way I can think, I share with you some of the therapy I have experienced in the past several months.

I have since finished this project. Old Dresser, 2005.

I was charging ahead on this project, until I ran out of money.
Another Old Dresser, 2009.
Letters Without Lovers: Starry Night, 2009.
Letters Without Lovers: I Picked You Some Flowers, 2009.

Letters Without Lovers: Sunsets and Sherbet, 2009.
My Roommate's Door.

Kitchen Safari

These are a few of my favorite things.

With nothing better to do on Friday afternoon, I decided to explore the kitchen of my Seattle apartment.

Eclectic would be an understatement for the collection of things my roommate has acquired from households past. Before today, my experience with the kitchen was as follows: drinking water out of glass jars, doing dishes with a pink fuzzy, burning all sorts of food on dented pans, catching fruit flies in balsamic vinegar traps, and squeezing minimal food items into a full refrigerator and freezer. I decided to start my Friday afternoon project after opening the freezer for ice and being showered with frozen items slipping from their precarious placements. Since bags and boxes of half eaten frozen foods were already on the floor, the freezer seemed like a good place to start.

How to clean out a freezer when none of the food belongs to you:

Step One- examine the food on top for expiration dates and/or recent handling activity. I like to approach freezers as a geologist approaches layers of rock. If the food on top is expired or completely unused, chances are that everything below that point is older and more expired than the things on top. My excavation was a little trickier, as I started off with my top most layers landsliding to the kitchen floor.

Step Two- err on the side of throwing things out. If the roommate is upset in the end, tell them you will replace everything of value by either buying or making the missing item. The kicker with this solution is that the roommate has to remember what was thrown out to claim it missing. I don't think I will have a problem in this situation, as most the food dated back past January of 2008. I also cleared out two full garbage bags before reaching the bottom of the freezer, which left me incredibly impressed with the actual volume of our appliance. Nice work freezer.

Step Three- make sure you empty the freezer near garbage day or when you know you will have a few days of cool weather. Unfortunately, I completely avoided this step and filled our trash with spoiling consumables two days after garbage pick-up and during a record breaking week for hot temperatures. Go me! Hopefully this place won't smell too similar to a landfill as the week goes on.

My favorite finds of the freezer were a paper bag with large chunks of chocolate and half a bottle of Sambuca di Amore imported liquor.

After the freezer, I moved on to draws and cabinets. Oye vey! This took forever! One by one, I pulled out the drawers and their contents, emptied them on the floor, marveled at how much paper could be crammed in one drawer, and started at cleaning up the mess. Aside from some basics, the drawers had no apparent rhyme or reason to their contents. On drawer had grocery bags on top, bamboo skewers and chopsticks on the bottom and blank cards scattered throughout the middle. Two hours later, I'm fitting the last drawer back into place with its contents tamed and organized. I wonder how long my efforts will last.

The cabinets were a different story from the drawers. More glass jars, a pile of flour weevils, electric appliances that one could spend all day guessing at the usefulness, lots of empty boxes, and my favorite item of the day, a bag of silverware. After getting everything removed, cleaned, organized and put away, I decided to explore the bag of mysterious silverware. First I separated the spoons from the forks and knives. Then I tried to put spoon with matching spoon, fork with similar fork, and knife with anything that looked like it belonged together. Not a single piece of silverware matched any other piece of silverware. What a task to either collect the silverware from lost sets over time, or picking through second hand stores to get the pieces fitting perfectly in their completely mismatched sets. I arranged them and took pictures of my findings.

Yeah, Knives!

And Forks!!

And SPOONS!!!

The kitchen and my Friday, there you have it! Hopefully next weekend I will be climbing Mt. Baker with my beloved family, so as not to be left to my own devises and proving myself crazier and crazier every day.

Why Bremerton is Beautiful.

It is 9:00 at night and the heat in my attic apartment is shrink wrapping my clothes to my skin. I spent the hottest part of the day with hundreds of other people at Matthew's Beach on Lake Washington, lamenting the heat in bits of shade and cooling off in fece infested waters. Although I hear many condescending Seattlite comments regarding the backwoods nature of Bremerton, I can't help but think of the things that make Bremerton beautiful: endless stretches of available waterfront, floating in the cool salt water of Oyster Bay with my childhood friend on an inflatable kiddy pool, sherbet colored sunsets over the Olympics outside the Global Bean, miles of trees and farmland instead of pavement and people, graffiti reminding us to enjoy nature (to name only a few).

In pictures, this is why I find Bremerton beautiful:



I will eventually find the same beauty in the city that I have in the rural suburb, but that will have to wait until it is not 100 degrees outside.

Learning to Play Guitar, Day 2: My wrist! My wrist!

Day two of my online guitar lessons: I can't feel my left hand and the corresponding wrist throbs. I should probably heed the advice of my lessons and cut back the playing to 15 minutes everyday, lest I injure my wrists or fingers so soon after starting. A person's hand is probably not suppose to feel like the size and elegance of an inflated balloon, after all. Lies. I'll just keep on keeping on and hope my hands adjust to their newest task.

Today I learned minor cords, a really weird sounding scale, and how to strum. My playing still sounds atrocious, but I like to think it is less assaulting than the sounds I produced this time last night. Also, I'm sure my neighbors living the next floor down are less than thrilled that I practice guitar at 11:30 at night. However, I like to think it is me getting back at them for smoking outside my window and talking until 2:00am on a random Wednesday morning. Yeah for civil Seattle neighbors and passive aggressive methods of dealing with problems.

I also learned the necessary cords for 90% of the old hymns written: G, C, F, Am. I plunked my way through Come Thou Fount. Hopefully come August end, I can watch the sun set and play some hymns to the approaching night. I am currently accepting auditions for random percussion, be it the spoons, tambourine, or little plastic eggs filled with jelly beans.