Nyataimori

July 22, 2008

beach beach beach

the second (and longer) half of my july vacation took place in rockaway beach, OR with the fam. every time i share this information my head starts singing,

Rock a bye baby on the tree top
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock
When the bow breaks
The cradle will fall
But I will save baby
Cradle and all

this was almost distressing as the shortcut via national parks i took to get to the beach from medford. though a lot less pretty, i suppose. shel silverstein has it correctly when he says:

Rockabye Baby, in the treetop
Don't you know a treetop
is no safe place to rock?
And who put you up there,
and your cradle too?
Baby, I think someone down here
has got it in for you!

rockaway really had nothing to do with treetops or babies. toddlers, yes, babies, no.

we were there from sunday to saturday which is a really long time at the beach. i'm not complaining, because it was awesome and my lovely friends nuala and kristen took turns playing with my kittens to appease my fear at leaving them alone. still though, 6 nights. looooong. i read sooo many books. i took an entire paper bag up with me and read all but 2 of them. plus i bought several more and read 1 of those so far ('lucinda, darkly' by sunny.) and i'm almost done with verne's 'journey to the center of the earth' [$1.75!] which i'm pretty sure has no relevance to 'journey to the center of the earth 3D'. i'm seeing it in all its 3D glory tonight anyway. so excited.

we took turns cooking too which gave us the chance to sample others' culinary skills. i made curried crab nests and nectarine galette on the night my mom and i made dinner. she made everything else (flaky phyllo halibut, corn on the cob, and apple-cranberry salad.) sure there was a disproportionate amount of cooking on her side compared to mine. but my appetizer and dessert were a smashing success!

there was delicious trips to the tillamook cheese factory where i had fresh ice cream, cheese samples, and fudge. and we went to astoria and cannon beach both of which i love. there was kite flying and dam building and hot-tubbing. it was an excellent vacation with some of my favorite relatives (i wish adam, erin, and evan could have come too. and my uncles dick and dave and their fams were supposed to come but didn't end up making it. still we had the mary fam and the peter excellence so it was pretty sweet.)

rest of the pictures here.

Posted by michele at 09:38 AM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2008

i'll show you my talent

i might have missed miss texas falling down at miss universe this year, but i had an excellent vacation last week in ashland with the peeps and at the beach with my relatives.

my first experience with erica, sophia, marina, jason, jolie, jacob, and lisa occured in talent, OR next to ashland. we went up and saw plays (further racist/homophobic adventures of hedda gabbler and the clay cart) at the ashland shakespeare festival and stayed in a rental house out in the woods. the house was awesome and HUGE. we had hot tub good times, margarita good times, and BBQ good times with a random frenchman (friend of jacob's from work, not really so random).

possibly my favorite times of the weekend were just hanging out and chatting shit up. erica, jason, and i co-authored a book the first night after everyone went to sleep with the tagline: "you otter know her". it was a YA book about a girl working at the monterey bay aquarium with the otters. she falls in the water one day and is rescued by a hot boy from her school. they end up going to prom together and then having an after party at the aquarium with more friends. they get caught and she gets fired. eventually though of course an otter gets sick and only she can help him so they ask her back and everyone lives happily ever after.

the second night marina and i stayed up way too late in our room laying down the smack. always one of my favorite activities. :)

so here are the pictures i took from the weekend.

Posted by michele at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2008

fish styx

when my mom was younger she had a series of black cats that she named styx (for the river styx, black as the devil's soul), so when i adopted one of my former foster kittens (who is all black) i wanted to name him styx too. but since i'm me i had to add something weird to it. so fish styx is his name-o.

i've gotten yelled at by multiple people now, so here are some photos: