Author Archives: Bevin

Despite the fact that it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, it hasn’t bothered me much.  Some days Josh and I leave the apartment and are gone so long during the day that I’m in no mood to update the blog when we finally get home late in the evening.

Now that it’s the next day since I wrote the above paragraph, and I have a lot to cover.  I don’t think I’m going to go over all of it in this entry, because frankly some of it I don’t want to talk about.

Yesterday Josh and I spent some time out of the apartment getting groceries, which was fun.  We also headed to Trader Joe’s and got some yummy stuff.  Speaking of that, with our new blender the summer has been lots more fun.  We’ve already made a few smoothies, and our new smoothie recipe book is coming in very handy.  Wanna know what smoothie we made last night, and the night before?

Watermelon.  Mmm!  Recipe to follow in the next post.

I’ve been listening to more Jonathan Coulton music.  Yay!  His stuff is so fun… and I encourage you to listen to these songs (in no particular order):

Skullcrusher Mountain
I Feel Fantastic
Ton Cruise Crazy
Re Your Brains
Code Monkey
First Of May (NSFW)

I had coffee with my mom today at Tully’s, which was nice.  She had to come in today for one reason or another, so she stayed home yesterday.  I had coffee with her on Monday as well, although we had it here at the apartment and I made it myself.  -grin-

Lots of other stuff going on this week.  I got a wonderful call from Jennifer M. last night inviting me to go and do something with her on her birthday, which is this Saturday.  While it’s nice that we’re going to go somewhere, it’s also the day before Mother’s Day, and I still don’t know what I’m doing for that one.  Anyway, we’re off to go to bridal shops (I’m her bridesmaid for her wedding in August ’08), and then to Pike Place Market to hang out for a bit.

Sunday should be a busy day for Josh and I.  We’re set to meet my family in the morning on the island to eat breakfast at the Braeburn or some such, and then that afternoon we’re off to North Bend to have a meal with his family.  So many miles to travel.

You know those songs that you feel guilty listening to even before you hit the play button?  I’ve got one of those on.

Oh, and I’ve just, uhh, acquired another movie that was pretty hilarious.  It’s called Farce Of The Penguins… and guess who wrote, directed, and co-produced it?  Bob Saget.  Yep, that Bob Saget, the one from Full House.  His movie is making fun of the popular movie March Of The Penguins obviously, but he got Samuel L. Jackson to narrate his too!  Tons of other famous people have little cameos in the movie as well.  How can you have a cameo in a movie about penguins you may ask?  Well, because he’s using stock penguin footage for the whole movie and the actors read the voices for the different “characters.”  Totally amusing.  If you want to watch it and live near me, let me know.

Not much else is going on right now, but there are a few events that I want to go to over the summer.  Silent Movie Mondays is back at The Paramount, and so for the next three weeks they’ll have silent movies with the wonderful Dennis James on the organ, so I want to go to that.  Then Jessica is due June 1st, and in August PAX will be here in Seattle and Jonathan Coulton will be playing (giving me a reason to go, heh), and also in August is the musical Young Frankenstein which is debuting in Seattle before it appears on Broadway.  Also coming to Seattle is Spamalot, also at The Paramount, which I desperately want to go to as well.  That’s coming in October.

That’s it for now.  I’ll post the smoothie recipe and get the blog updated on my many knitting adventures as of late.

What have I been doing lately? Well, that depends on your point of view. On the one hand, I haven’t been doing much at all, but on the other hand I have a couple things to mention that I’ve managed to accomplish these last few days.

For starters, I made a batch of cookies. That was pretty yummy. I had chocolate chips that we got on sale awhile back that were chocolate and mint swirled together. Good times there. So the cookies ended up being a bit big (and yes, I’m aware that a particularly good blogger would have taken a picture), but everyone liked them. And by everyone I mean Josh, my dad, and all of his coworkers who were close enough to his cubicle to nab one before they ran out. -grin-

In addition, Josh and I “stole” my parents’ blender, so we’ve been buying fruit like pineapple and strawberry. We also got one of those endlessly amusing “personal watermelons” to munch on, which has been quite yummy.

There’s more knitting news, but that’s for a post under the “knitting” category I’m afraid.

Josh and I have been watching a bunch more movies, and the last two were random Thai kung-fu types, which we had to watch with English dubbing because I was busy frogging a sweater and couldn’t catch all of the subtitles. Normally that would not go over well with me, but really I didn’t care much about the movies.

Oh, and this morning my dad and I had breakfast. We were supposed to have it yesterday, but when I got dressed and ready to go and finally called them, they hadn’t quite gotten up yet so we had to reschedule. I was slightly annoyed at that, only because it was so early in the morning, heh.

This mornings breakfast went well though, I had my usual ham, egg & cheese sandwich and a coffee. My dad showed up a bit late, and by a bit I mean a whole hour, so my usual wait from 7am-8am was lengthened a bit ’till 9am. The result of that was an extra amount of coffee, since I managed to finish the coffee I started the morning with at Starbucks, and had another one once I got to breakfast with my dad. Heh. Oh, and I had a blueberry/cream cheese danish, which I took back to the apartment and ate later. Mmm.

That’s about all I’m going to update for now. I’m currently watching Red Dwarf commentaries (have been for a few days), so I’ll get back to being amused at that and hopefully get enough pictures this afternoon to update the blog on my knitting. Woo!

Today my mom had a doctors appointment. Usually this wouldn’t concern me, but today it did because she was taking the day off of work after her appointment, and was wondering if I would like to do lunch with her.

So I did. Heh. We ended up going to Cheesecake Factory, where I had the Chicken & Avocado Club sandwich. We had the spinach and cheese dip for an appetizer, and I had their passion fruit iced tea to drink, which is always delicious.

Of course we ended up being too full to actually get any cheesecake, which was slightly disappointing. And of course I was just as full, so I shouldn’t have minded. But that pineapple upside-down cheesecake is to die for.

After lunch we headed off to do some shopping, I suppose because my mom needed a new bath mat and some bath towels to go with the newly-remodeled bathroom. She wanted it to have a bit of color and look more “sumptuous” but she ended up going with beige/cream as her color anyway.

We headed over to Macy’s Home and they had a whole section of bath towels and bath mats, but of course they all cost an arm and a leg. That’s what happens at Macy’s… everything is Ralph Lauren this and The Hotel Collection that. Anyhoo, we ended up browsing their bath mats for what seemed like forever before she could decide on one. Those mats shed like the dickens as well, so by the time we were done we were covered in fluff. Granted, being more fluffy should be on everybody’s to-do list, but I can’t say this was my first choice of going about such a thing.

I have to say though that they do have some soft bath towels there. Although the majority of them weren’t actually that soft, they just had a ton of colors. The one brand that only came in about 6 colors was the softest one, and it was cheaper than the Ralph Lauren collection! Ha!

After our towel escapade, we headed over to Belle Pastry to get some coffee and kill some time before my mom had to pick up my dad from work. I’d made coffee this morning thinking that my mom would want some when she stopped by to do her hair (before heading off to her medical appointment), but I suppose she wanted more so off we went.

I had my usual vanilla latté and she her dry cappuccino, and I also had a crossiant.

But you won’t believe this (okay, maybe it’s not that hard): the woman who worked there went to high school with my sister! She saw me and asked if I had a sister, and when I said, “yes, Caren” she said that I looked just like her. I can believe it because everyone says that, but I have to say that I and even my mom never actually see what they’re talking about.

Once our coffees were ready and I went to go pick them up, she started asking me if I was younger or older, and you know what she said? “Oh, well you look younger, and sound younger.” Thanks. Hmph. I’m aware that it’s usually a good thing to be considered younger-looking than you actually are, but really, I’m only 21, this isn’t the time!

I know that my longer hair kind of makes me look a bit younger, but really. I only bitch about this because it isn’t the first time I’ve heard a similar comment. I’m getting tired of it, can you tell?

In other news Josh and I managed to borrow my parents’ Mel Brooks DVD collection, and we’re about to watch Silent Movie for the first time. Should be fun!

This last weekend Josh and I went over to the island to go up to Fort Casey with my mom and Chester The Dog.  We left at around 9:30am and got there around 11am and carpooled together up there.  The weather was pretty good actually, we had the requisite amount of wind, and there wasn’t too much sun.  Josh and I both had our cameras, so we were able to take a ton of pictures.

As far as those go, I’ll sift through them and put the nicer ones in an album on my Gallery page.

Although we brought my stunt kite, we didn’t actually get around to flying it.  Before trekking all the way up to Fort Casey, we had picked up some lunch at the deli in Langley (at the Star Store), and so we spent some time picnicking.

Chester The Dog actually did very well while at Fort Casey… at home he usually has trouble with new dogs and strangers, but there were plenty of those around at the park and he didn’t have a problem at all!

It also surprised me that they didn’t seem to have the little pay-to-park box that they installed a few years back.  I remember getting so ticked that we had to pay $5 to park at Fort Casey, and only ended up going once during that time.  But this time we went I didn’t see that box at all, and certainly didn’t see anybody paying for parking.  That was pretty cool.

So that was our Saturday.  After a few hours there we came back and hung around the house on the island and ended up catching the 9:50pm ferry home.  We had salmon and steak for dinner and fruit smoothies, which was pretty yummy.  No games were played this time around.

So Josh and I went up to Kirkland for the free cones of ice cream, and it was great!  There wasn’t much parking, so Josh stayed in the car while I went in, and they were mice enough to let me get a cone for Josh too despite the fact that he wasn’t there.  I got the Cherry Garcia flavor, and got chocolate ice cream with peanut butter swirls for Josh.

Now that we’re home, Josh and I are watching a borrowed copy of Transporter 2.  It’s good killing-time fare.

I was thinking about creating a “tasty treats” or “ice cream” category of some sort, just for this post, but I’ve decided against it for no particular reason.

Anyhoo, apparently because it’s Tax Day today Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shops are giving away free cones today.   The closest one to us is about 6mi away in Kirkland.

Doesn’t seem that far, but we know Josh.  -grin-  Especially since we have no other earthly reason to go to Kirkland.

But, I think I’m going to bring it up again just in case I can change his mind.  It’s sunny out, we should do something, right?  Of course he’s been at work all day, so he probably just wants to come home and hang out.  We’ll see.

ICE CREAM!

Yeah, my mom and I met for coffee today at Tully’s.  She brought her work laptop and we tried to get it to connect to Tully’s wireless, but that didn’t work very well at all.  Stupid XP.

My sister was pretty annoying yesterday.  She called with a Mac problem, that turned out to be a user problem instead.  She was exporting her document as a Word doc, which was fine.  But when she tried to open the .doc, it would try to open it with the trial version of Word on her laptop, not Pages.  So I had her change the settings and whatnot so that Pages would be the default for future .docs, but it didn’t change the picture for the icon to a Pages icon.  We tried it again, and this time the icon was a nice little Pages icon.  Well, it opens in Pages, so that’s all good, right?  Apparently not for my sister.

According to her, if it’s a .doc it should show a Word icon.  If it’s a .pages it should show a Pages icon.  I can see where this comes from, but it seems to also make sense to have it show the icon of the program that it will open in, especially since that’s pretty much how it works universally on Macs anyway.

But no, this is bad, and changing your settings to always show the file extensions (something that is by default hidden, a nice feature I think) is the bane of all existence.   The way it should work according to her is that it should always use the icon for the type of file it is, not the program it will open in, and because of this Macs suck a big one.

I mean come on.  Is it that hard to understand?  Just because you’re a user and one way works better for you, doesn’t mean that it works better for everyone.  There are two reasons something isn’t done the way you like it: the company is incompetent, or you are in the minority, meaning that it works better for everyone else.  Considering Apple’s reputation, which one do you think it is?  Oh, right.

This wouldn’t cause me so much distress if my sister didn’t call me up and expect me to fix the problem and change how the whole computer works for her to make it exactly the way she wants it.  There are things she didn’t like about Windows, but she didn’t hold that against them.  The Mac is supposed to be the solution to all of her problems, and if I can’t fix it all hell will break loose.

Some of her problems stem from the fact that she doesn’t realize that Macs do things differently, and in the end it makes things easier… but since they don’t work the way she expects them to she gets ticked off.  Isn’t this the old-curmudgeon syndrome, not something that happens to a teen?

I’m done with my rant now, I promise.