whale sighting!

snapped on our way into Oceanside yesterdayHello from the stormy and extremely wet Oregon Coast! It's been raining no-stop, with intermittent bouts of wind, since we arrived. It is fabulous.

We braved the rain and slight (though not terrible) chill for a bit of a walk this afternoon. Down to the public lot/overlook just below our cabins and just above the beach, and up and down the length of downtown Oceanside proper (all two blocks of it). The tide is too high to go down on the beach itself, but the lot/overlook provides a terrific viewing point for enjoying the beach in lieu of doing so from the sand.

Since it's about 30 feet above the water, you get a little further view out past the three arches than you do from the sand. And despite the leaden skies and rain, visibility was good enough to spot a whale about a mile or two out from the beach, just past the southernmost of the arches, moving northward. (I know they're currently migrating south, but this one was definitely moving north. Perhaps one of the 400 gray whales that are said to live off the PNW Coast instead of moving between Alaska and Baja?) We of course didn't have our camera, so we just stood and watched with great glee and awe. Our first full day here and already this vacation is a win!

This is actually the second time we've had a whale spotting. The first was during a visit to Cape Meares about four or five years ago -- we saw two small pods migrating north about two miles off the point (three miles off the shore proper). (I still need to catch up on posting old pics from trips like that one, so I'll have to look to see if we had a camera with us then....) Since Cape Meares is such a high vantage, you have a good view all up and down the coastline, so we were able to watch that pod for more than half an hour before they passed beyond our view. And since it was a spring migration, they had several calves in tow, which made it all the more amazing and inspirational.

Anyway, Whale Watching Week continues through the 1st, so if you have a chance to get to one of the designated watch spots, I highly recommend it!

boxing day

a sneak peek at the much talked about creative room; or, a pic in which the kitties prove that they do in fact own every room in the houseI have the "Christmas Time is Here" theme from Charlie Brown Christmas running through my head. I was never a fan of that soundtrack when I was a kid, but it's one of my favorites for Christmas now. (It also contains the only version of 'O Tannebaum' I have ever liked.) I love the introspective, melancholic feel of the music, even though I don't feel that way at all. It seems to suit a grown-up Christmas mood more than a kid's; maybe that's why I didn't like it then and love it now.

We've had quite a vacation so far. We finished the creative room a week ago Friday, amidst other obligations -- including an evening dinner party down in Oregon City -- and have been spending pretty much all our time since then in there, playing. I need to finish updating on the work from three years ago and then I'll have posts and pictures about the work we just finished. I'm so excited to show it to you! I have a gazillion pictures, so be prepared.

We've also been to the movie (Voyage of the Dawn Treader) tried a couple new restaurants (Little Big Burger in the Pearl and Tasty & Sons on North Williams), mainlined more of S2 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, made gifts for each other and Sister and Guy (we exchanged homemade gifts this year), shopped for the Fabulous Miss M, passed new levels of Zelda on the Wii, slept in a lot, and traveled to Salem and back to celebrate Christmas with our beloved Smiley family.

We headed to Salem Friday afternoon, to arrive to a warm house that smelled yummy and smiles and hugs from Sister, Guy, and Miss M. We had seafood chowder for Christmas Eve dinner, then bundled up and headed to their church for the candlelight service. (And oh man, talk about Charlie Brown Christmas...I can never listen to someone reading the traditional passage from Luke without thinking of Linus' KJV reading.) Then it was home again to get Miss M in her jammies and off to bed, set the coffee table with plates of cookies, and relax on the couch to visit. We brought our Wii controllers so we could do a fun foursome of Wii Sports Resort, but just never got around to it. No complaints here...I love just visiting, and especially around the Christmas tree. Guy read 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, we shared our favorite Christmas memories, stuffed each others' stockings, and went to bed waaaay too late.

Christmas morning was opening our stockings, then breakfast of egg dish (a traditional casserole-type dish from Sister's family), orange sweet rolls and pecan sweet rolls (all homemade, of course!), and then we opened gifts from under the tree. Miss M was commendably patient for a three year-old, waiting her turn to open packages in between the opening of the homemade gifts among the adults. (More about the gifts in the next post.) After a bit of play, it was time for a much-needed nap for everyone, Miss M to her bed and the adults crashed on the couches and recliner in the living room.

We enjoyed a late afternoon snack-lunch of cold honey-baked ham, cheeses, veggies, bread, and cookies, and watched a couple of the old Rankin/Bass Christmas classics together with Miss M while we ate. (You forget how scary the Abominable Snowman was to you as a little kid until you watch it with another little kid for the first time. Miss M had to check a few times that Sal was still sitting beside her during those parts, in case she needed protection from the monster.) Before we knew it, it was time to head home to be sure the cats hadn't burned the house down, with Sister cramming plastic containers with leftovers for us to take with us and Guy making sure the beer was all packed safely for the trip home, and Miss M refusing to say goodbye because she didn't want us to leave. A good visit all around!

Hobbes is exhausted after a long day of sleepingWe came home to a house still standing and no immediate signs of destruction, which was perhaps the best Christmas gift of all, considering the state we've come home to at times in the past. The kitties were glad to see us instead of refusing to get near us as punishment for being gone, there wasn't a lot of unpacking to be done (we'd packed light and of course there weren't a lot of gifts to be unloaded) so we were able to just kick back on the couch in contented weariness to watch a couple of movies and then go to bed.

So today is a play day, a do-whatever-we-want day, a this-is-an-awesome-thing-about-being-an-adult-because-you-can-do-anything day, and then ProcrastiGirl arrives tomorrow to watch the cats and the house while we head to Oceanside for our winter coast vacation, a much-needed dose of Oregon Coast. It's supposed to be rainy and yucky, which means it will be awesome. The New Seasons grocery delivery arrives later today so we'll have plenty of deliciousness to munch on (along with everything Sister sent with us), we have a couple of shows to marathon, a new book to read, another to write :), and of course wi-fi and our laptops to keep us entertained if we need it (no seriously: what did we do before the internet??) in between walking the beach, visiting Cape Meares, or simply staring out the window at the beauty of waves crashing on the sand. God bless us, every one.

t-minus two days and counting

Vacation begins in two days and it's a race to the finish whether or not Sal and I will drop dead from exhaustion before it gets here. But after this weekend, I like our odds. We worked our tails off but somehow managed a smidgen of R&R in there so we're refreshed for this final stretch. And yesterday was a particularly lovely day. While we both worked (more on that in a minute), we had the radio tuned to the local station that switches to a holiday music format for December and had such a pleasant day together, laughing and singing along. In just a couple of days, we'll have nineteen days of time like that.

My company holiday party was Friday afternoon, and although I couldn't afford the lost time for what I need to get done before I'm gone, it was a welcome respite and loads of fun. Probably the best holiday party we've had in all the time I've been there. We've sure had some doozies so that's saying something. Oh, and I won a $50 Home Depot gift card. Which is kind of funny, since the $100 Home Depot gift card I won at the company picnic bought all those smoke/fire detectors last weekend.

The party finished an hour earlier than scheduled and rather than be the workaholic I'm sometimes accused of being by going back to my office to finish up some things while there were no interruptions, I instead decided to hit Collage finally, after Kim told me about it when we met for coffee last week. I really almost wish she hadn't, because the last thing I (or my bank account!) needed was another terrific art store on my list and within my immediate area. Well of course I spent a ridiculous amount of time there and came out with a ridiculously overstuffed bag of goodies, but what can you do, right?

The dark clouds were just starting to release the flood as I was headed up the stairs to my front door. We've had some real toadstranglers of late, so it was another in a recent spate of them. I had things around the house to be done, but the perfect weather for being curled up on the couch combined with a week of late nights, I ended up falling asleep watching a movie and I blame the rain. Cue Milli Vanili.

We spent the weekend working on the creative room, getting the painting done and most of the furniture together. Woohoo!! We'll finish up the furniture and putting the room together on Wednesday, then decorate and put things away in the room on Thursday, and by Friday, we should be able to use it. Arty crafty days, here we come!

lunch, blue bunny & moons:

• hazelnut crusted chicken breast
• jasmine rice with sweet & sour sauce
• Honeycrisp apple, celery sticks
• satsumas

The weather's been positively biblical all weekend. Rain measured in inches, records broken, that kind of thing. AND freakishly warm. Like, high 50s, low 60s. We had to open the windows to air out the house a bit last night -- Sal baked an apple pie (OMG SO MUCH LOVE) and something from a previous meal started smoking in the oven -- and ended up leaving the windows open most of the evening, it was that warm. Torrential rains and unseasonable temps? That kind of wildly erratic weather doesn't bode well. Because, in the words of the venerable Lewis Black, "I know what comes next...

...locusts."

scenes from an art store and other paint-related adventures

Proof that we totally weren't kidding about the Pepto-Bismol thing.Less than a week until vacation, holy crap! So much to get done, but I'm so excited that the OMG CRUSHING WEIGHT OF IT ALL isn't even stressing me out. Well not much, anyway. And poor Sal...well, he's just got his head down, plowing through this final week and then I expect he'll reward himself with one of his bigger bottles of homemade beer.

I've got another update posted on the work we did two years ago -- this time, the painting in the library. Yep, we finally, finally exchange the heinous pink for a radically different -- radically awesome -- color.

Also, the Lord of the Rings wins all the things.

lunch, black strawberry:

• two molded eggs, both the star AND the heart
• roasted yam
• celery sticks with peanut butter and raisins
• satsumas and pomegranate seeds as gap fillers

Following an appointment downtown last night, I took a detour to an art store nearby that I like. As I was browsing, a woman came in and asked the clerk at the counter for advice. Her husband wants to become a painter, she says, but he's never painted before. She wants to get him paints and brushes for Christmas, but isn't sure what to get. Acrylics? Oils? Watercolors?

After some discussion, the clerk helps her figure out that the type of painting her husband wants to try isn't watercolors; more back and forth and she finally settles on acrylics (easier to clean, recommends the clerk). He shows her to a nice starter package that includes a good set of paints in a nice wooden case that can hold 9"x11" canvases. She wants everything her husband needs to get started, so the clerk smartly loads her up with gel medium, gesso, brushes, canvases, palette knife, and an easel. Dude is gonna be set.

The whole time, I'm quietly amused as I listen to the conversation (they were loud, I wasn't eavesdropping), imagining the husband and his newfound passion for painting. I'm thinking how sweet that his wife wants to encourage this new interest and what a nice Christmas gift he's getting under the tree this year. And I can't help but wonder: just what has prompted the sudden desire to be a painter?

I'm behind her at the checkout counter so while the clerk is adding things up, I motion toward all the supplies and say, "That will make a really nice gift. I'm sure your husband will be thrilled." She smiles and agrees, saying that he's always been hard to shop for so it's nice to finally have something really special to get him. I take the opportunity to ask my question: "So what prompted his interest?"

She grimaces, then laughs a little. "Well you know, they've been showing that guy on PBS again, and I think my husband just got inspired to give it a try."

"Oh, Bob Ross? I'll bet he's inspired a lot of people like your husband. That's pretty cool."

"Yeah, but if he starts talking about 'happy little trees', I'm having him committed."

once you've been to serenity, you never leave

I've been rewatching Firefly thanks to Mark Watches, whom I was first introduced to via cleolinda when she pointed up his Mark Reads series on Twilight. Well of course I had to check out his site because hello, Zombie Shame Parade, and anyway, who doesn't love a good game of Horrify the Twilight n00b? So when he moved on to Harry Potter, I was already hooked. With HP, though, it was a matter of love instead of hate, which is even better. Man, there's nothing like watching/reading someone experience something you love for the first time. It's the closest you can get to recapturing that first-time feeling. It's downright addictive, I tell you.

He finished up Harry Potter a few weeks ago and started his own sites, one for books (he's doing the Hunger Games trilogy right now) and one for TV shows and movies, to continue the project. So, as I said, he's moved on to Firefly, and Eru bless whoever suggested that as his next thing, because as we all know, my love for Firefly knows no bounds and I will be a Browncoat to the day I die.

I was already mulling a rewatch since it's been awhile -- I haven't watched since the last Browncoat Day, now that I think about it. So having that feeling of love refreshed, a rewatch was inevitable.

But it's always a bittersweet thing, because as I said, LOVE, but there's also the inevitable WHY WHY WHY and even eight years on, I'm not over the cancellation. (The hardest thing about the WHY WHY WHY is that even when the show was still on and in danger, we knew they'd eventually regret cancelling it, yet despite a positively Herculean effort, we couldn't stop the cancellation from happening. So to have it so universally loved and recognized in the intervening years is one hell of a Pyrrhic victory.)

Anyway, if you're a Firefly fan and you haven't watched in awhile, I recommend both a rewatch and the Mark Watches Firefly series for a bit of diversion.

lunch, laptop lunch:

• sandwich of herb roasted turkey breast and cheddar on buttermilk bread
• steamed broccoli and roasted potatoes
• celery sticks with a bit of ranch for dipping
• satsumas
• chocolate milk in the drink bottle for a special treat

"Once you've been to Serenity, you never leave. You just learn to live there."
-- Zoe, Firefly

from a distance, we look like paragons of efficiency

Smaug and Hobbes, being their usual productive selves, which is to say IN ABSOLUTELY NO WAY WHATSOEVERProductive weekend, I'm happy to report. Which is a relief because I feel like there's a countdown clock hanging just over my shoulder -- as previously mentioned, I'm taking off the second half of December to coincide with Sal's winter break from school but there is much to be done in the next week and a half. Nonetheless, I feel like a kid looking forward to Christmas, or perhaps the way I did in college: excited to have a breather from the stress and homework and tests, but a shitload of difficult finals to get through first.

It started off on the right foot: not with work, but with fun. Friday, I met up with my friend Kim for coffee (well, hot chocolate, actually) and we spent a few hours catching up and trading info on cool creative things, tools, and new places to spend way more money than we should shop for all the things that make an artist's heart go pitter pat. So it's thanks to her that I was feeling energized enough to focus on website updates when I got home.

So I've completed a few more updates on the guest room and library projects from a few years ago. We're getting into the exciting stuff now, like neato decorative window films and painting the walls at last:

Library, Part 4: Fixing the Window & Wall

Guest & Creative Room, Part 4: Fixing the Windows & Ceiling

Guest & Creative Room, Part 5: Painting the Room

Note that the text is not the same for these posts, nor will they be from here on out.

I hope to have the painting in the library posted tonight; that was a far more dramatic change. It was fun to look through the pictures for these phases of the projects and remember all the little snags and interruptions we had to overcome, but to look at them knowing about the end result and how much we love the outcome. Or to relive the sense of accomplishment when we'd successfully completed a particularly challenging part (wall patch ftw!). One of the reasons I've been documenting all our home improvement (mis)adventures is to be able to go back and see how far we've come and to remember what it took to get to this point. As I've gone back through these pictures to get caught up on these two projects, but with a few years' distance, I'm reminded of all the hard work that went into them and each time I go into those rooms now, I have a renewed sense of pride in them. Also, how thankful I am that we got rid of that heinous pink.

Saturday, we got the paint for the creative room and I did the preliminary work on the aforementioned sooper sekrit project in preparation for (probably) painting this coming weekend. Sal had to do the transfer to secondary fermentation of his latest batch of beer (brewed last weekend). He also fixed the dripping faucets in the kitchen and bathroom, the broken handle on the toilet, and put in much-easier-to-use faucet handles in the utility sink in the basement. His trip to Home Depot for the hardware also included the purchase of nine(!) smoke/fire detectors and two carbon monoxide detectors so that we don't literally die in a fire. So yay, no house-induced death for us!

AND! We spent Saturday evening going through several boxes of papers and mementos that had accumulated in the eave closets, the product of needing to clean in a hurry -- for company, more often than not -- and throwing stuff we didn't have time for into a box "to go through later". Well "later" came Saturday night since I had to drag out some mementos boxes anyway to put away the things from the guest room that had been on display and stored in my old desk. We're not done, but we put a respectable dent in it.

Despite our weekend of industry (or perhaps because of it), the house looks like a wreck, but I should have time this weekend to instill some order. Nothing too catastrophic, thankfully. I do have to wrap up my website clients for the month (statistics analysis, final report, and invoicing), and I expect I'll be working some late nights right up until vacation starts in order to get the end-of-year programming done on the billing program, but at this point, I'm not in freakout mode. The fact that I'm still thinking I can fit in housework in the evenings indicates that I'm in not-yet-overwhelmed-but-possibly-a-tad-optimistic mode. Don't try this at home, kids.

And just to round out the list of accomplishments for the weekend, I got a breakfast AND lunch packed for today. I've been away from bento for a couple of weeks and I'm feeling it. There was the week of the holiday, of course, and I worked from home in the days leading up to it so no bento. Last week was occupied by visits from Corporate (the COO on Tuesday and one of the members of the Corporate IT Team at another division on Thursday) so I either was too busy in preparation to even get a drink of water (Monday) or joining them for lunch (Tuesday and Thursday). So again, no bento.

It's a testament to how little I go out for lunch, how infrequently I eat at chain restaurants, and how accustomed I am to my bentos that I didn't feel well at all last week. The restaurants were decent as chain restaurants go, but nothing about the meal felt good. Way too much food (I ended up leaving most of it on the plate, unfortunately, and I absolutely hate waste), much too heavy (even though I ordered a salad!), and the fruit and veggies didn't have as much flavor as I'm used to. Yes, I fear the worst has happened: I've become a food snob. :) I think in the future when I inevitably have to go for these Corporate lunches, I'll plan to pack a bento anyway to eat before/after and just order a small side of something for lunch.

Anyway, it's a relief to be back to a bento schedule. As I was packing today's, I initially felt a little rusty, like I was getting back on a bike after being away for awhile. Once I was done, I felt the familiar sense of comfort and assurance that I have something to eat tomorrow that I know will be good for me, that won't make me feel like chugging a bottle of Pepto afterward, and that gives me enough energy to get through the day. I know I go on and on about the wonders of bento and the difference it's made to my well-being, but I just can't overstate it enough.

breakfast, cute animals sidecar:

• satsuma mandarin
• red grapes
• plain yogurt with a dollop of marionberry preserves

lunch, deli club:

• chicken that Sal made for dinner Sunday -- he tucked slices of lemon under the skin and roasted it
• roasted potates (olive oil, salt, pepper)
• kiwi slices and red grapes
• satsuma mandarin and the last of the dark chocolate covered raisins

Oh how I love the satsumas. Sal came home from the grocery store Saturday night bearing an entire box of them for me. I'll probably give myself a rash of canker sores from eating as many as I possibly can while they're in season, but it'll be worth it.

we have color!

We've just returned from the paint store with the paints for the creative room. We're keeping the wall color, we'll just be...ah...complementing it with a few more. Behold:

clockwise from top: Pink Explosion, Cut Velvet, Wonder Woods, Au GratinThey're not quite as vibrant in this pic as in person, nor does the image do justice to the creamy pale yellow of the wall color, but close enough for horseshoes and handgrenades, as my dad used to say.

We've got some organizing and putting-away to do this weekend, and a preliminary project that's sooper sekrit (not really), so we won't be painting quite yet. Probably next weekend, though!