Author Archives: Bevin

I’ve gone to the dark side.

Josh and I are watching Season 1 of 24.

Go Jack Bauer!

Josh and I have run out of space for our books.  Well, rephrase that.  We don’t have the storage we’d like to have to put all our books and need more storage boxes and the like.  Anyway, we’ve split the sci-fi book drawers into two stacks now and are trying to put our extra books on the shelves and all that.  My knitting stuff is now going in the “dining room” area, if you can call it that.

I’ve got a bunch of books in seemingly random piles all over the bed here, ranging from classic literature to humor to war memoirs.  I’ll have to find places for all of them, since each shelf on our bookcases is both full and categorized by genre.  Hmm.

In other news, Josh just showed me an old picture of him and Kate before they headed off to Homecoming (or Prom, not sure which), and it’s adorably cute.  I’ve let him know that I have plans to scan the photo but he’s reluctant and has tried at least once to get the photo back.  He won’t get far.

Not much else going on these days… oh right!  My mom went ahead and bought tickets to the musical Young Frankenstein that’s previewing here in Seattle at The Paramount Theatre.  Unfortunately though, the tickets were about $58 each, with a $10.50 convenience charge.  And if you go for the $75 tickets, the charge goes up to $11.  What?  Is it somehow harder to sell you a more expensive ticket?  Sigh.

My mom can help out and cover my ticket, but it’s quite a bit more to ask her to cover Josh’s, and because of the steep price he’s not interested enough in going.  But, August 11th should be quite a fun night regardless.

Oh, speaking of this weekend, something interesting happened.  Josh got a call from Pilgrim Lutheran Church (the one down the street here that he used to play the organ for) asking him to substitute next Sunday.  Interesting, huh?  Well, at least since they kicked him out anyway.

It turns out that they needed a substitute this weekend and next weekend, but this Sunday they called Jennifer, who apparently didn’t work out that well at all, which is why they called Josh.  They made a definite effort to avoid calling him but in the end they had to come around.  Ha!  I’m totally amused.  He definitely likes playing, so maybe they’ll ask him to sub more often in the future.

We made smoothies today as well… watermelon with Mango sorbet, it was really yummy.  We made a double batch.  Mmm!

I’ll, uh, try and update again tomorrow.

Actually, I’m pretty not-busy, as it were.  Josh left for his ICS Mentor training in Cupertino on Tuesday, and won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon.  On Tuesday I actually talked to my dad about going out to eat (we went to Toy’s Cafe here in Bellevue and had Chinese), and we realized that 1) I had very little to do over the next week and 2) He was out a carpool buddy.  Therefore, I went back to the studio and packed up some stuff making sure to also take the blender.  Yes, my dad requested that I bring the blender to make some smoothies at the house.

Point is, after work my dad picked me up and I helped him get home earlier than usual.  The great thing about the evening (other than the smoothies I made) was the fact that my dad barbecued some burgers that he’d made.  Which I have to say were delicious.

After the dinner Lisa and I hung out for awhile… I’d let her know that I was going to be around so we made a plan to meet up.  Late in the evening there isn’t much to do on the island so in the end we made a smoothie and spent some time talking.  It turned out really nice and I had a lot of fun… we talked about a wide range of things, and I didn’t feel so much like I talked her ear off this time.

So since Josh left I’ve been carpooling along with my dad to save him some time and sleeping on the island.  My dad took up the couch in the living room (with my uncle using the armchair) and let me use their bed, so I didn’t have to sleep on the floor in my sisters room again.  Oof.

During the day at the studio I’m mostly trying to avoid the heat this week… although things have been getting a lot better in that department.  Tonight I might actually go back with both my parents (my mom is getting picked up today from the airport) although I haven’t quite decided yet.  Since her plane comes in at about 2pm my dad is going to pick her up and probably bring her back to hand out with me the rest of the afternoon while he finished up his work.  He suggested that my mom and I go get some dinner somewhere, which could be nice, but we’ll see what happens.

Josh gets home tomorrow and I’m pretty excited about that!  Woo!

Actually, mostly nothing.   I do have Napoleon Dynamite on though, which is fun to have going while I do stuff around the apartment.

Speaking of the apartment, there’s a lot of stuff to clean up, so I’m trying to get some of it done before Lisa gets here, which is another thing I haven’t mentioned on the blog yet.  I talked to her on Wednesday and we set it up to hang out today, so right now she’s getting ready to head over.  I think we might make some smoothies, then go to a thrift store or two.

So Josh got invited by a childhood friend to hang out this evening.  He’s not sure if he wants to go, but at the very least I think Lisa and I will make sure to go thrift store shopping in Redmond to give him an excuse to leave early if he wants to.  -grin-

I did make some more Peach Apricot iced tea the other day, and it was quite good.  The penguin-shaped ice cube tray that we got at Whole Foods is pretty awesome, and makes pretty cute ice cubes.

This weekend should be a busy one as it turns out.  Being that it’s Memorial Day weekend, it means that Valley Camp is having their free-for-all, and that Josh and I will be out there all day tomorrow.  Not sure what we’re doing Sunday though… my parents want us to come out but I’m not sure if Josh would rather spend the day at home lounging.

Speaking of my parents, my dad bailed on me again today.  I called him because he had some ferry tickets to give me care of my mom, and I needed to pick them up.  Well, I called him and he asked me if I was doing anything for lunch.  Seeing as I was not we arranged to meet up at 11:30am and go to Fatburger together.  Well in the end he called me at 11:30 and said that he’d been invited to lunch with someone else and he was really sorry but he had to cancel.  I’m cool with it but my mom thinks it’s really lame and that he was being mean.  Haha.

In a few I’m going to call him so we can meet up anyway so I can get the ferry tickets… that way next time Josh and I go to the island, we won’t have to shell out $20 just to visit them.  That’s kind of a lot for a day’s outing just chilling at the house.

Not much else going on here.  It’s really hot out today, so I have the cheap-o fan on that I got my dad once for his b-day that he’s lending us.  The fan is helping out a bit, but so is the fact that the sun has moved westward.  Heh.

Not the the blog knew about it, but I’ve had a cold for the last week or so.  Mostly my symptoms for colds last about a day each if it’s not a bad one, and this one was gearing up to be no different, until I got to the coughing stage.  It’s usually a bit worse for me in general that most other people, but even so this time it lasted much longer than it should have and I’m still coughing up stuff today, despite the fact that I haven’t had any other symptoms for at least 3 days.

That was a long sentence.  I’m gonna go find something cold, and good to drink.

So today was also fun.  I got a call from my mom this morning asking what we were doing because she needed to go shopping.  The day was supposed to be a bit rainy, so it wasn’t a good time to take Chester up to Fort Casey, and plus JC Penny was having a sale.  Heh.

So I talked her into coming up to Bellevue to go to Penny’s instead of just heading to Alderwood so that I could go with her.  She came over and we (my mom and I, not Josh this time) went out to lunch at Maggiano’s downtown.  It’s an Italian place, and it was pretty good, although there are few things I’ll comment on.  For one the tea was excellent.  But otherwise, we had some caprese salad for an appetizer… but the tomatoes were bland and too thick.  My sandwich also had some problems.  It was a salmon sandwich with apple bacon, avocado, and mustard.  It would have been good except that the brioche bread was incredibly sweet.  I didn’t like it much.  With our appetizer plus the second one of fried zucchini and my chips I was pretty full.  At least we got bread with oil and vinegar before we started!  Yum!

After the food we headed over to the mall and after browsing for awhile we ended up at the much-heralded JC Penny’s sale.  It was actually quite a nice sale because a lot of the brands themselves were “buy one, get one for $0.99”, which was about the same as half off.  Now while I only had a few dollars to spend my mom had much more since she was particularly shopping for her Vegas trip in the coming weeks.  The great part?  Because of the sale which gives you the second garment for $0.99, every garment she bought she offered to use the $0.99 on me!  In the end I got a skirt and a button-up shirt… basically the same things she bought.

After our shopping was done we went over to Jamba Juice (not the one at the mall) and got some smoothies.  Yum.

Jennifer and I had a great day out on Saturday. She was kind enough to pick me up, and then we headed out to downtown Seattle. We drove around for a bit looking for bridal shops, but we soon decided that we weren’t in the mood, so we parked at a garage on 3rd & University and walked down to Pike Place Market.

It was a lot of fun walking around, like last time we went to hang out there. We passed by a Chinese tea shop which was having a free tea tasting, and I ended up getting some Blue Tea that’s supposed to help with diabetes and high blood pressure. It was kind of amusing, because I got it because for one it was yummy, but also because if my dad liked it, maybe it could help him, you know? But as soon as I mentioned it to my mom she immediately thought it was an excellent idea for my dad and asked me to bring it over when we visited on Sunday. When we got there and I told my dad about it, he acted like I had bought it for him… haha! So in the end they repaid me for the tea, we drank some during the day, and I left it with him. Hopefully it will actually help him.

Anyway, after we stopped by there on Saturday, we mostly just wandered around to different shops enjoying the weather. For mother’s day, I got my mom a small loaf of wheat and gluten-free banana bread, and a mini New York cheesecake. For lunch, I went and had a gyro and shared a small smoothie with Jennifer.

Josh was nice enough to hand me $60 before we headed out, but I didn’t spend more than half of that, so I was pretty happy.

Regarding the subject for this post, something else interesting happened to me that afternoon. Jen and I were walking down 1st street when some guys started talking to us… it turned out that she’d cut their hair in Oak Harbor just two days ago! Since it was Jen’s birthday and they knew it, they wanted to take her out for a drink up in Belltown, which was “a bit of a hike” up the road. I wasn’t really interested in going, so I told her I’d be across the street at Seattle’s Best Coffee.

I got my grande iced vanilla latté and went up a few steps to a landing with armchairs to sit in. About six chairs, actually, and I sat at the one in the back, in the corner.  For a few minutes I was by myself; that is, until a man came up onto the landing and sat in his own chair next to mine.  Since I was in a corner, there were two chairs “next” to me… each with a table between me and the chair.  He was on my left, facing perpendicularly, toward my right.

After a minute or two I reach for a newspaper and at the same time he decides it’s time to read.  The only words we exchanged were me asking him if he wanted any of the paper I had.  One thing I noticed though: every time I made a big-ish movement he’d actually turn his head to look at me.  Of course I pretended not to notice, but after a couple of times it seemed a bit odd, especially because there was nothing behind me but a wall, me being in the corner and all.

So I put my paper away and suddenly he’s done with his as well.  Of course at the time I wasn’t really in a “something is fishy here” mindset, so while I remember all of this later, it didn’t really cause a red flag at the time.  After a minute, you can guess what he did.  He started talking to me.  Now, I like some good conversation as much as the next person, but usually when it’s conversation with a stranger in a place we both might be awhile, I’m not so interested.  Usually it’s just idle chit-chat, and when it gets awkward it gets really annoying.  Since I was going to be sitting at this coffee shop indefinitely this could be a problem, because I didn’t want to have to get up and leave just because I wanted to get away from a bad conversation.

Needless to say, that’s exactly what I got, bad conversation.  He asked me where I was from, and I kind of led the conversation from there because he didn’t seem all that good at asking me new questions about myself.  And to top it all off he was incredibly agreeable!  How awful.  There’s nothing worse than a conversation with your bullshit detector going off all the time.  “Oh really?  I love hiking!”  Sigh.

I mentioned who I was with and that she’d be meeting me soon which I was quickly hoping would be right away.  Once she did show up, I managed to talk to her for a bit about her time out with the “boys” and kind of left our new “friend” alone.  I kind of hoped that would be the end of things, because I noticed him finish his coffee anyway (coincidentally, it was a small coffee).

Well, he did leave.  Actually, he got up and left without saying goodbye!  Considering that it was him that started a conversation I thought he was a bit ticked that I was talking to Jenn so much.  Not that I minded, it meant that I didn’t have to deal with him any longer.   At this point I start recounting the story of this odd person to Jenn.  Luckily she thought it was pretty amusing.

Ok.  Since I still had some coffee left of my own we just naturally sat around for a few minutes while I finished it.  Want to know what happened next?  You won’t believe it, trust me.

He came back.

Yep, the kinda creepy guy came back and walked right up the landing to where I was and said to me, “here, I thought these would look beautiful on you” and hands me a little plastic baggy.  Inside were earrings, two green ones.  He mumbled something about the green matching my shirt right before I said, “oh.  You shouldn’t have.  Really.  Honest.”  If the earrings had been obviously worth more than the $7 they looked, I certainly wouldn’t have taken them.  But as it was I was sure that he didn’t have any use for a girls pair of earrings in any case, so I thought the best bet was to just accept them and leave it at that.

Unfortunately for him my ears aren’t even pierced. I mentioned that and he tried to talk about a friend who might be able to re-fit them as clip-ons, at which point I made up some bullshit about how easy it would be for me to do it myself or something like that.

Then the big question came.  “Uhh, would you like to go on a date sometime?”  After the initial, uh, bewilderment, I said to him, “Oh I’m sorry, but I’m with someone.”  Seems like the kind of thing someone should have asked before you go out and buy a girl cheap earrings.  Jenn thought that it was cute but I’m a bit more skeptical about the ordeal.

So I give him the number for the rejection hotline, but just in case Jenn was on the ball and said to me, “hey Bev, can I have my cell phone back?” trying to tell him that I didn’t have a phone, or a phone number for him to ask for.  She immediately used it to call her own cell phone and had a fake conversation with our “friend” saying, “oh sure!  We’re just leaving now, we’ll be there in about 5mins.”  Totally awesome, thanks Jenn!

Well, she hangs up and asks the guy how old he is.  “Oh, 35.”  35?!  See, he didn’t look that old at first so none of my radars went off right away.  I would have guessed late-twenties at first.  Of course he asks me how old I am (note that he didn’t ask Jennifer) and I reply that I’m 21.  No idea whether he was phased by that or not.

That’s about all I can remember about the time at the coffee shop… after all it did happen a week ago.  But the rest of the day went quite nicely.  Josh got a huge kick out of what happened, and wished he could have been there in his kilt to scare the guy off.  -grin-

Yay for creepy guys.  Oh wait.