Joshua and Bevin

I managed to hang out with my mom on Friday and that ended up being quite a lot of fun.  She only had to be at work that day until noon for some meeting, and then she had the whole afternoon before her and my dad were headed home so she asked me if I wanted to tag along while she shopped for some shoes.

The original plan was go head over to Factoria but we didn’t get around to that because we were immediately hungry.  Heh.  Of course her favorite place to eat at the moment (when it downtown Bellevue at least) is Maggiano’s Little Italy, so that’s where we went.  By the time she had actually gotten out of her meeting and headed over to meet me though it was already 2pm, so you can imagine that it was a bit surprising when we finished lunch and saw that it was 4pm.  Oops.

We didn’t end up going to Factoria but we did come up with another plan.  We met my dad and decided to head up to Lynnwood to do a bit of shoe shopping, get my sister a new tape adapter, and go to dinner.  The only caveat was that Josh wasn’t off of work yet, and him and I were supposed to come in our own car (we do need to get ourselves home after all).  In the end he just got off of work too late, so he had to come and meet us just for the dinner part.  So sad for him that he had to miss the shoe shopping… heh.

No shoes were found among my mom and I, but my dad managed to randomly find a nice big pair of boots for himself that looked pretty nice.  Funny how things work out sometimes anyway.

Dinner was set to be pizza (easy to take some home for my sister) but that place ended up being insanely crowded so we diverted over to Cafe India (highly recommended if may say) and had a delicious dinner.  I had my usual drink, a mango lassi.  In fact I wasn’t the only one to have that drink as Josh and my mom also had one.  My dad as of late has been drinking the salty lassi’s, which I don’t understand myself.  Why drink something that tastes mostly like salt?

After dinner it was already getting late so Josh and I headed home.

Another entry with a lack of exciting news.

Oh, but I am going to a concert tomorrow night!  Jonathan Coulton is performing at The Triple Door!  So very exciting.  I hear that The Triple Door is a wonderful venue and that we’ll just love it.

In not-so-exciting news, Josh is leaving tomorrow afternoon for a week and doesn’t arrive home until Saturday morning.  Then the next day he leaves again in the afternoon for Pasadena, California for another two weeks (one because he’s a mentor, and the second because the ICS there is too afraid to fly so they asked him to be there the two weeks instead of having s/he come up for a week).

Bah, Josh being gone this long isn’t going to be that fun.

I’m listening to Dan Savage’s podcast… we’ll see if I like it. I do tend to find his column funny in any case.Not much is going on today so far. My mom called me this morning to use our bathroom, and after she’d come upstairs she asked if she could straighten her hair (she brought her own cheap flat iron), and I just ended up doing it for her because I have a nicer straightener now and she asked if I could do just the back of her hair anyway. Either way, we went to Tully’s and I brought my laptop and I ended up staying there until around 11:30am.

My dad called me today, which is a first (usually I call him) and asked me to lunch. Woo! It’s that day of the week where burgers at Fatburger are only $2 instead of $3.99. We walked down there after I had a minute to put my laptop back at the apartment. Mmm their strawberry shakes are good though.

I took some pictures of what a nice day it’s been today on my way back home:

After I got home it was time to do some actual work, so I did the laundry and washed the dishes, loaded pictures onto the iMac, wound up some yarn that’s been drying, and made some iced tea.

Wow I had a boring day. I’ll try better tomorrow. -grin-

You can guess where we were last night. Josh got off of work early and we drove down to the Puyallup fair to get in line early for Weird Al. His show didn’t start until 7:30pm, but because there was limited free seating to the show we wanted to get there early. That, and well, there was probably going to be lots of traffic going south.

Another reason we left early to get in line was because Lisa was working that day and also wanted to go to the show, but she couldn’t leave West Seattle until 4:30pm. We figured that it really wouldn’t be enough time to get in line, so we ended up leaving separately.

The show was tons of fun, but very long and very loud. Now I like loud concerts as much as the next person, but the three of us decided that the sound levels for the higher ranges were much too loud. After the show our ears were ringing and we could barely hear anything! Towards the end I was actually starting to get annoyed at the lack of quality when it came to their sound.

But, he did do quite a few songs from his new album, including “White & Nerdy”, which was a lot of fun. He did a medley of songs from previous albums and his current one, including part of “You’re Pitiful”. Fun times! Of course he performed a few of the classics that he’d get beat up for if he didn’t do, such as “Yoda,” “The Saga Begins,” and “Amish Paradise.”

Most of the older songs were done in pretty much the same way with the same costumes, but it was still a lot of fun. He even sang “Wanna B Ur Lovr”! He donned a cheesy red suit and wandered around the audience. At one point he was standing on chairs and the whole bit. -grin-

One of the best parts though was when he sang Albuquerque! I haven’t seen him perform that in concert yet, and I just figured that it’d be a hard one to do because it was so long. But apparently not! That was a lot of fun.

Our seats were pretty good, and we didn’t feel squished in the stands at all. Neither did it get cold, which I was pretty happy about. At one point he was singing a short-ish song about cell phones (taken from a Weird Al TV interview) and we all had our cell phones out waving them around in the dark, which was fun. A few people broke out their lighters for the occasion when the slow songs came on.

The concert was pretty long, and I think that was because in order to have enough time to change outfits between sets he would play a little video or clip on the two large screens to either side of the stage (and the one big one on stage), which takes up a good bit of time if he does it after every song, you know? So a normal hour and a half concert with all those videos makes for very little singing, hence the extra length.

Every concert performer these days seems to assume that they’re going to do an encore, enough that crowds kind of expect it and don’t bother to show the enthusiasiam that is usually needed to convince them to come back on stage and do another song. That, however, didn’t seem to apply to this crowd, because as soon as he left the stage everyone around us was shouting “encore!” until they came back out. They had planned to, but I guess the crowd wanted to be sure, haha.

He also performed “Polkarama,” which was a lot of fun. He seemed to use the accordion a lot, which was pretty neat. During the Star Wars songs it was great; he had a bunch of people in storm trooper costumes kinda dancing behind him while he sang the song, and when the chorus would come around they’d all turn together and do a little dance. Totally amusing!

If it wasn’t so dark I probably would have gotten better pictures, but as it is I didn’t want to bother everyone with my digital camera’s bright screen, nor the flash, so I used neither. That kind of makes it hard to know how far you’ve zoomed in and whether the picture is fuzzy though, so I only have this one picture to offer:

In the end the concert was a lot of fun, though the loudness really messed with me internally. I hadn’t eaten much that day and nothing at the fair really appealed to me, so after Josh and I got back to the car I started to feel a bit nauseous and I had a headache. Ah well, I feel all better today.

I hear that Weird Al is also going to be performing at the Yakima fair, and if it’s anything like last time Josh and I saw him there, I really recommend going! You might have to stand in line a bit and sit on metal bleachers, but the venue is a bit smaller than Puyallup so you’ll get a good view no matter where you are. And if you’re cheap and hardcore like Josh and I, you can even do the whole trip in one day and come home right after the show.

You really should try it! “Woo” for Weird Al!

In that not-so-much kind of way.

On Saturday when Josh and I went around looking for things to do in Seattle, we did a couple of things:

• Ate lunch at Uwajimaya
• Bought a kilt at the Utilikilt store
• Walked along the pier
• Drank a Passion Iced Tea from Starbucks
• Bought fudge

Yeah, I know, we don’t need fudge. But they had so many yummy flavors, so we just got the two kinds. Vanilla Caramel, and Peanut Butter Chocolate. Yes, it was quite delicious:

Other than that, I’ve been inspired to fly my stunt kite more now that I’ve been to Gasworks Park recently. I have one, but I haven’t done much with it because it’s been in the basement on the Island for awhile and while there, the string got very grimy. Josh says that the integrity of the string might have been compromised, which makes me worry about using it high winds. In the end though, we figured that we could not fly the kite because we’re worried about the string breaking, or we could fly it and have the potential for it to break. If it does, we can’t fly the kite, which is where we were before.

One day though, I would like to get a parasail style kite like the one this guy had (his kite is the darker green one on the right):

Now tell me that isn’t cool! His kite was so large and professional-looking that he had gigantic black handles/sticks at the end of the strings; it looked so cool!

Since I’m thinking about it, maybe I should go parasailing and bring some knitting, just so I can start some kind of world record or something. Extreme knitting? Is that at all like Extreme Ironing?

I took many more pictures than that are in the last post, and while I strongly suggest that you take a look at the photo album in my Gallery, I know it’s a chore to navigate to another site. My two readers can’t reasonably be expected to go there on their own time, so here we go: I’ll post a picture or two once and awhile in the blog. Woo!

I was thinking about being at Gasworks Park as I was getting this entry ready and decided to take a look on Wikipedia to see if they have anything to say about it. And they do! Check out the Wikipedia article on Gasworks Park here. There’s a lot of interesting stuff there, so go take a look if you get a chance.

I was also thinking about blogging in general today. Some folks on Ravelry were asking about what makes a good blogger, and there were a lot of good responses. But in the end I concluded that being a good blogger really isn’t my goal. I mean, sure it’d be nice to have hundreds (or even thousands!) of readers, but that sounds like a lot of pressure just to feel well liked. Sure, that wouldn’t be the only thing I’d get out of it, but that would probably be my motivation in the end. I have no desire to have people come to me or my blog for useful information… that’s not the kind of work/effort I want to put into it.

In the end I want this blog so that I can look back on it and read/remember what I was up to during one time or another, and also so that I can see how my opinions or feelings on things have evolved over time. Because I certainly notice it for some things, but I’m afraid that I’ll forget a lot of it.

I’m always asking my parents about things that happened to them when they were younger and they have trouble remembering. That’s understandable, but when I have all of this new technology available to me that make it incredibly easy to document my life, I figure, “why not?” It’s like those people who take a photo of themselves once a day for years, and you can see how they alter and change over time. It’s really neat, and I don’t feel like it takes up much time. Even blogging isn’t that time-consuming, and when it is I really enjoy it because I’m tweaking with the layout or discovering a new widget to add to the sidebar.

Anyway. It’d be more than wonderful to think that there are people I know who read this thing, but in the end I have to remember that that’s not why I’m doing it. Sure it’s cool to think that someday someone might use their microphone and record me an audio comment, or that they’d comment at all on the blog, but I shouldn’t rely on that to feel good about it.

I’ve said to a few people that one day I think it’d be really great to get my blog printed out and bound into a real book. It’d be a nice amalgam between the future and the past, don’t you think? I hope to keep this blog going for years, and maybe I can have a bookshelf one day with hardbound books there, all lined up and in chronological order ready for me to reread in a few years when I’ve forgotten everything.

Of course there’s the issue that my books are no longer protected. They’re just out there, in the open, for anyone to read. Sure, that’s exactly what I’m doing with my blog, but in theory I could delete any post that I no longer liked, or immediately make my whole internet presence private with the click of my mouse. I can’t do that with a book… it’ll always be sitting there waiting for somebody to pick up and read it.

I worry about these things because I’m experiencing what everybody does: Every day I think more and more that I was an idiot in high school. Not in a really obvious sense, but I can definitely see areas where I’ve matured, and I’m not sure that I want/need people reading back that far and seeing that part of me. Maybe in a decade or two when I feel more separated from that period of my life I’ll feel more okay with it.

We’ll see how things turn out. I’m not really in a financial position to get these entries printed and bound anyway, so it’ll be awhile. Let’s just hope the whole of the internet doesn’t crash and lose all its data. Then I’d really be screwed.

I had this whole cool post made up about how cool permalinks were, but then it turns out that I can’t even use them that way in my blog. They’re still cool, just not all that relevant. So I guess I’ll just stick with the picture that I’d intended on posting.

As it turns out though, while Gallery2 does support permalinks, they’re permanent links to the gallery page displaying the picture, not just the picture itself. But, as it turns out, Josh is brilliant and figured out that if he copied the image location and then moved the image, the link would still work! What does this mean? It means that I can put pictures into my blog that are any size I want. Totally awesome.

To further illustrate my point (and because I just want to) I’m going to include in this entry a picture that I took at Gasworks Park last Saturday. A lot of folks were there hanging out watching the kite flyers.

I’m at Tully’s this afternoon drinking a grande iced lavender latte. Mmm.

I know that I don’t have my website up yet, but really, I’m thinking about it all the time.  Ha!  I will get it up sometime soon.  In the meantime though, I do have a photo gallery set up at my domain, which I have been adding pictures to on a regular basis.  Few people read this blog; fewer visit my photo gallery, but I think it’s worth mentioning that it’s now my gallery that Josh adds to.  Sure that sounds a little confusing, but really Josh takes a lot of nice pictures that are better added to the gallery by him than by me.  Those pictures will say, Owner: Josh when it’s something he’s uploaded.  He even has his own main album set up!

Some of you may see a photo and fall in love… some of you may take that feeling and end up in a place where you are “borrowing” that photo to use somewhere in your corner of the internet.  Whether it’s Flickr, your own blog or your own personal collection, it’s not cool to take our photos.  It’s happened before, and really, Josh and I don’t want to have to send angry take-down notices all the time.  Got it?

I wouldn’t think to mention it if it hadn’t happened before.  We’re cool if you like our photos, we’re even cool with you asking to use them… we just want you to ask.  We’ll usually say yes.

I haven’t done that little “rant” here on my blog yet (I don’t think), so I figure now is as good a time as any to do it.

I do have quite a few more photos uploaded into the gallery though… it might be worth checking out.  Especially if you like Gasworks Park.  And puppies.