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It's 2:42 AM and I'm in the middle of Henna-dying my hair kinda sorta red.

No apartment just yet. We've (I've. Since when am I a 'royal "we"' kind of kid?) moved to Craigslist roomshares in houses and other sketchy living accomodations.

My car is getting ready to give up its ghost. Any day now. I had an estimate done, and at $450-$500 to get the bugger fixed, I decided it's more worthwhile to buy a new car, or be all Portand green eco-conscious and reduce my carbon footprint (read, trail of garbage for the REST OF MY PITIFUL LIFE) by selling/scrapping said vehicle and being a public transit-or and biker. Like, bicycler, not motor-biker. As much as I would like to be a motorcyclist.

I removed my stitches from last week (or so) myself a few days ago, and that seems to be healing nicely. I'll have a cute lil' scar to remind me of my embarassing story soon enough. haven't cut myself on anything else lately. Well, massive paper cuts, but what can you do?

I have baguettes upon baguettes upon baguettes. Some of you should really work on coming to Portland/living in Portland so I have some people I know to give things to. As it stands, most of downtown Portland's homeless population is going to benefit from my thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of education.

WCI took my transcripts from CBC, and it knocks 3 classes off my schedule. Which rocks. I'm not sure whether or not I'll be able to be done early, but at least I'll be able to sell my books back prior to the class. Yay!

I ate some AMAZING deep-fried crab wantons at the Saturday market, and I almost asked the guy if I could come into the little booth with him and learn the crab wanton magic. It was quite blissful. I also bought my dad's Christmas present, and it's the first time in years that I've felt like this is a meaningful present that I know he wants and will value. Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy, and he's always real appreciative, but he has everything he needs, basically. He's super hard to buy for because he's not a collector, his sports fix is taken care of at the high school, and I don't know anything about sports anyway, and there's just never anything that seems to fit. But this is something I know will be awesome, because it's a nostalgic thing he was talking about when we were on vacation. And I am excited beyond belief.

In less important news, I'll be 23 next Wednesday. Basically old. Yikes.

Finished Blue Like Jazz on the MAX lightrail last Tuesday, and I have to say, it was an amazing book to read in the city it was written in. He's not the best writer, but he's an honest story teller, and I walked through a lot of the things that weigh on my mind with him as I read the book. It was just what I needed just now. God is a good guy that way.

I'm completely a consumer whore because last Sunday I was reading my training manual for GAP as I sat and had a holiday latte from Starbucks. Grind my beans in the corporate machine, for sure. Oh, well. It's a living. kinda....

kisses, all!

Pastry Bags, Eclairs, and Heavy Sutures

Yep. I just spent a couple of hours in the ER, but it was a couple of hours less than it might have been since some nice doctors took me across the hall before they left for the night and stitched me up. It was a nasty pastry bag star-tip cut. Or a big knife, if you prefer, because that's probably a more exciting story.


As for the Hospital, it wasn't too bad.

The thing that bugs me the most at the moment is that I can't type very well, because I have this giant gauze contraption on my right index finger over my three very deep, very hospital grade sutures. life is tremendous. And I have to work in the morning, which is rockin'. I am a tired girl. But it's nice to know there's lots of people in this city who love me, and I didn't have to ride the lightrail home from the hospital.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go take my Vicodin a la House.


ps Molly: the apartment would have cost me $625 a month.

Out of innocent curiosity

I looked at an apartment this week. I don' t have the money to move in, and now I'm trying to score a second job as well to pay for things (the first job, though awesome and with lots of room for expantion, is only on the weekends for now).

I called around to a few estate companies that have upwards of twenty buildings each. One I called had nothing available, and the next one had 18 buildings and two apartments for rent. This is the hallway into the one I looked at:

That's the apartment door, over on the left. I should have taken a picture of the bolts on the other side of the door. There were 3. One of those hotel slider-types, and two deadbolts. Beefy door security.
This is the kitchen:

Here you can see one of the two windows in the whole thing. The other one is smaller. (It's a basement studio apartment. The cheapest thing this neighborhood had to offer).

Most of the rooms had some nice built-ins, but that's about the most positive thing I can say at the moment.

<--This here is the bedroom, a shot taken from the door, as far away as I could get and still get a reasonable amount of the room in the picture. My backpack and sweater are on the floor, but they're not making the dimensions exceptionally easy to gauge. I figure the room was about 11X12, it had room for a fold-up Murphy bed (not that I have a Murphy bed, or any real desire to have to own a Murphy bed...), and that darkish square in the left of the frame about 1/2way up the wall is the room's heater. I don't think there was such a thing in the bathroom, but there might have been one in the kitchen. Closet space was a coat closet that warred with the front door if you tried to open it, and two shallow linen closets, one on either side of the Murphy bed cut out.

The bathroom should show you how clean, modern, and useable the whole thing seemed to be.

The reason I couldn't get the door open more was the ridiculously cracked and (poorly) re-enamled iron clawed tub. Looks like there's a little heating unit to the left of that toilet (the newest looking thing in the house). I guess I was wrong about the heat. This room had an astounding number of built-ins, and the other window. Not that my main living space needs a window anyway.

Just for fun, here's what I discovered right across the hall from the studio:

Hooray! A terrifying boiler room! Where, apparently, everyone in the building also parks their bikes.

I always dreamed of living right across from where the creepy mainainance guy sleeps on his straw cot with his cheap wine and porno-postcards!

Now, I'll let you guys know how much they wanted for about 300 square feet of Portland next time. Any guesses?

By the way, I looked at this just out of curiosity, but someone was definitely coming down to sign papers to take it before I left the renter's office.

Making stuff

This is what I made when I fell in love with chocolate piping over the weekend:

Pretty worthwhile, I thought. Now I need to find a frame, because there's no way I'm eating that right away.



This would be my tomato-basil-fresh moz-green pepper-red onion-parmesan pizza, and the hands of my very talented friend, Jonas, as he creates a 'true' Hawiian pizza, with hoisin sauce and everything.

So first week=exceeds expectations.

If you email me your address, I'll put you on the waiting list for cookie overflow. It's gonna be good.

In my free week before school

Rode the MAX all by my lonesome, and without looking like a total tourist, if I do say so myself. Caught up on some knitting, even! I love having someone else do the driving, leaving my hands free to do something worthwhile. And it's so green and, well, Portland, to use public transit. Always interesting people to sit by, I suppose. Overheard conversations in about seven different languages, the general vicininty of a really good crack dealer, a 'homeless argument' followed by a 'domestic argument' just short of a 'domestic disturbance,' the description of a guy to watch out for on the 42nd street crossover because these guys heard he 'shivved a girl this one time...' yeah. Makes me feel good to be a big-citier.
After some very successful (in my opinion, day after it's hard to tell) job hunting, I treated myself to a zoo afternoon. That's where I rode on the MAX. If you know your Portland Geography, I'm waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to the east in a suburb called Gresham, and the zoo is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay to the west, almost to Hillsboro. My secret MAX riding weapon is sunglasses. I can surreptitiously scope out fellow passengers, and in a pinch, pose as a blind person who's lost their dog or cane, and maybe people will decide not to mug me. I'm like an ice queen in sunglasses. Don't even bother smiling at me, street boy. I'm obviously not interested. I'm not too concerned about being harrassed (especially in mid-day traffic), but it never hurts to cover all your bases.
Saw some culinary students as the light rail zoomed past the school I'm going to, and they probably thought "look at the goofy grin on the ice princess in the sunglasses! What's her problem?" as I was not in uniform, and I don't really know anyone yet. I have to learn to keep my goofy grins to myself on the MAX. "Ice princess, ice princess, ice princess...."
So job hunting is going as well as can be expected in a city that posts roughly 500 jobs a day on craigslist, I'm getting along okay without a bike for now, I have a practical demo I'm going to for school on Saturday, I rode the light rail without getting molested or lost, my dear Myspace "Portland" group has instructed me on several bars in the general area with good old fashioned darts (I plan to get really good at darts while I'm here), I made some kickin' guacamole, I took pictures of wrestling Mayan Sun Bears at the zoo, my school uniform fits, and the Fred Meyer in Gresham has a Cinnabon (but at 1300 calories a pop, that's hardly something to be excited about).

In short, life is beginning to get good.