Jampacked: Guns, Tattoos, and Popcorn

The past few weeks I’ve developed this nice balance between having quality time to myself, spending time with friends, and a bit of working and studying thrown in here and there. Just some of the simple pleasures in life. Here’s a few things from this past jam-packed week that I’ve been very grateful for.

Acquiring more books.

The two books, plus my Moleskine and this lovely metal feather necklace I got.

I haven’t bought the two books that I blogged about a few days ago. However, I did buy ‘What is the What’ by Valentino Achak Deng/Dave Egger and someone gave me ‘Art by Tattooists: Beyond Flash.’ The first book — ‘What is the What’ — is an autobiography of one of the “lost boys” of Sudan and I bought it because I’m seeing him speak tomorrow night. If the timing works out, I may even get to talk with him personally. So, between now and then I’m just going to try and skim through portions of the book.

The second book — ‘Art by Tattooists’ — was a present from someone. For reasons I can’t explain, it was perfect; for reasons I can explain, it made my cry when I first saw it. I’ve always been fascinated by the art of tattoos but it’s just as fascinating to see artists’ work on a completely different canvas.

Hanging out with awesome friends.

A sign at Maggie’s — a coffee shop at my hippie-ish alma mater.

Soaking wet and seeking refuge under an awning but at least we’ve got popcorn.

Multiple late night runs to sketchy and not-as-sketchy breakfast joints in SE and SW Portland, respectively. Eating sushi while reminiscing about how long we’ve known each other. Long distance phone calls to precious childhood friends. Coffee, soup, and cupcakes over our inspiring life aspirations. Epic Scrabble games online. Running in the rain with popcorn in hand to find an unlocked academic building just to watch a movie on one of the large-screen projectors. And, as a testament to what a wonderful friend I am, I even went cologne shopping! I taught him a lot about the etiquette of trying on and buying cologne, which was sadly kind of fun.

Oh well. There’s nothing else I’d rather be than with friends.

Spending some quality time with the roommates. Read: shooting paint balls at a pumpkin and making food.

Shooting at a pumpkin! You can’t see the smiley face we had duct-taped on the pumpkin though.

The other day, a roommate bought some paint balls. I think I surprised them all when I dropped what I was doing, jumped out my chair, and skipped out to join them at the sight of the gun and paint balls. I won’t lie when I say that I can totally see myself as a military sniper in some alternate universe.

Last night, we cooked and actually had dinner all together — a rarity given our very different schedules. We made a delicious pot roast, fluffy mashed potatoes, roasted garlic asparagus (thanks to me!), peanut butter Reese’s brownies (my doing again!), and wine. It was very relaxing and homey. Oh, and delicious of course.

Buying a new laptop.

I have a new laptop! It’s an Acer Aspire Timeline 4810. Windows 7, eight hours of battery life, a super fast RAM, backlit LCD display… Mhmm. It’s gorgeous and decently priced too. I love the laptop but I feel like I’m cheating on my last laptop.

This means that I can no longer afford the tattoo that I’ve been saving to get since my money went to this laptop instead. That’s all right though because I know I’m going to get that tattoo and I haven’t yet found an artist that I want to work with. (My tattoo is going to be nothing short of epic so I need to find the right person to work with).

Academia + real world. This weekend, I took a practice GRE test at the Kaplan center downtown. It was an awkward experience because it wasn’t computer-based and it was just me, a friend, and two old ladies. My scores were a surprise though because my reading comprehension and sentence completion scores were perfect, and my verbal scores were higher than my quantitative scores! What the heck is right. But, since it was paper-based it’s not at all an accurate prediction of my scores.

As for my budding career, I received some unexpected but very good news. I don’t want to jinx it so I won’t talk about it until it’s all over and done with. Wish me luck for today and tomorrow though!

So, again, those were some of my little pleasures from last week. But, now, it’s your turn: what are you grateful for?

Rainy Portland

The rainy Portland that we all know and (sort of) love is here. The past few weeks we’ve been fortunate enough to have a relatively dry fall with crunchy leaves, crisp air, and beautiful golden and red hues against lots of green landscapes and blue skies. I think it’s my first real fall since moving to the city, and it’s just been gorgeous.

Case and point (although this was between Portland-heavy rain showers today):

The lovely view from the house. We live right across a golf course and the river. Spoiled, I know.

H’Ween

Surprise, surprise; an entry on Halloween! Halloween was a lot fun with parties on both Friday and Saturday night. I don’t think I can properly recap what happened so instead I’ll share with you these lovely photos from last night.

What I really wanted to be for Halloween this year was a taxi cab   The outfit would have consisted of a yellow dress with black and white checkered trimmings, black heels, driving gloves, and, best of all, a badge saying ‘Free Rides!‘ Unfortunately, I could not find a yellow dress so I settled on being a…

…rock star! (But I told drunk kids that I was an astronaut.)

Anyway, here are the less incriminating photos from last night.

Diva + Bro

We got hungry so we walked through the Burgerville drive-thru. They didn’t turn us down, which was a pleasant and delicious surprise. The cars before and after us were friendly too. Or they were just laughing at us.

We had a Waldo too!

And “dinosaurs.”

And a lot of fun.

Hope you all enjoyed the weekend regardless of whether or not you did something for Halloween!

Ice Ice Baby

The past work-week* was long and draining and I knew at the start of it that the weekend had to be relaxing and friend-filled. But, of course, with plenty of much needed personal time. Unfortunately, I only have photos from Friday. I forgot to bring my camera with me on Saturday (though there wasn’t much to photograph–I just watched movies, ate pizza, and drank wine with friends) and I stayed home yesterday for my personal time.

The view from my office window.

Lots of buildings and I get to see the trees change color. The streets are small enough/The buildings are close enough that I can see people working in the building across from my window. I’m a huge fan of people-watching (does that sound stalker-ish?) so it’s interesting peeking over once in a while to get a glimpse of some of the changes and of what they do.

Relaxation: iced coffee (it’s not that cold yet) and reading materials.

After I got off work on Friday, I headed over to Powell’s to pick up another copy of Barack Obama’s ‘Dreams from My Father.’ I decided to give my copy to someone as a peace offering of sorts and it seems rather fitting in hindsight since Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I then walked over to Peet’s to write a short letter explaining the present, and to start of my Maddy-time, before mailing it. Hopefully, it’s well-received by the intended recipient since I’ve had mixed thoughts about sending it…

Regardless, the book is definitely worth a read. Obama is a wonderful orator and, of course, it translates beautifully into his writing. If you’ve read ‘The Audacity of Hope,’ you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how young, underdeveloped, call it what you will Obama’s writing sounds in ‘Dreams from My Father.’

First (and last?) hockey game ever.

Later that evening, a couple friends and I went to an ice skating rink. (This was only after I gave up the fight for bowling and gave in to the idea of ice skating…) When we got there, however, there was a hockey game. We decided to stick around and I got to watch my very first ice hockey game ever. The game was between Portland State University and Western Washington University, which was interesting to watch but apparently not very exciting. I learned stuff about ice hockey though.

Yes, it’s us again (minus two other friends who were with us that night).

After the game, we took over the rink… and I finally learned the proper techniques of how to ice skate. Last summer (the last time I had gone), I realized I forgot it completely–I spent the whole time on the ice stumbling around while my friends were skating about. Luckily, two friends who grew up with ice (in Virginia and Denmark) offered advice and showed me until I figured it out.

So, that was most of Friday night (save for the part where we all headed over to a 24-hour diner and pie house. Mmm.)

*I started working temporarily at the place where I interned/worked for this summer again after they had heard what happened to me.

Pineapple Juice

It’s been a while since I created a blog entry with photos in it so here are some ridiculous/cute/fun photos of my two lovely friends and I from last night. For my sake, I won’t go into details of how the rest of the night went. I will tell you, however, that it was a lot of fun, I got to meet some new awesome people, and I used up my ‘the one that needs to be taken care of tonight’ card.

Remember all the craziness from a few weeks ago? It was a good few weeks of negativity crammed into a few days. So, I’m balancing it out and trying to have fun. And, I think I’m succeeding.

“151 Rum, pineapple juice and Malibu. Caribou get dem all numb.“