my one hundred and one: July 2010

day two hundred and sixty-seven

you guys! i totally just completed a goal without even trying! #81 = done. i was so busy this week that i literally not once sat on my couch until just now, when i turned on the tv and realized how foreign it felt. sweet! i wonder if some time in the next two years facebooking will become just as easy to stop wasting time on. here's hoping!

in other news, a bit of advice to anyone who happens to be reading: don't set up subscriptions for three magazines in one day unless you seriously love junk mail. it's like i can't throw it out fast enough.

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i also finally caught up on my word-a-day calendar today by cruising through three months' worth of word origins. here are my favorite lessons:

subaru - japanese word for the constellation we call the pleiades, six of whose stars are visible to the naked eye. subaru was the name chosen when, in 1953, six japanese companies joined to manufacture the now popular line of automobiles.

gauche - i only started hearing this word recently, but i've gathered it means something like socially inept. apparently it's derived from the french word meaning "left," as in the left hand, to which many languages attribute bad things. ha!

the zip in zip code comes from the bureaucratic phrase "zoning improvement plan," coined in 1963.

the devil in deviled eggs refers to the red spice paprika. well, ok, duh...

bit (as in computers) - the condensed form of "binary digit." what!

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aaaaaand finally, turns out my good friend liz has plans to sell her london flat. that flat was the impetus for goal #68, but now it looks like she and her husband will be yacht-dwellers instead. i get pretty seasick pretty reliably, so it's time to come up with #68's replacement. i welcome suggestions, but am currently leaning towards getting my motorcycle endorsement. that's how awesome riding in kauai was.

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day two hundred and sixty-four

'twas a weekend of pro-sports, and i have another item crossed off (#36). kyle's brother kendal was in town, and in order to show him a good time we went to both the mariners game on friday and the sounders game on sunday. we lost the first and won the second. and both were super fun, minus the twenty minute journey to find our seats at qwest field, during which all three goals of the match were scored. it's not as bad as it sounds, since we caught a couple of those while circling the perimeter at near-field level. i have more pictures than i do things to say about the games, so here they are!

mandatory group shot under the cheesy mural

the bros

it was jon's first pro-baseball game everrrrrrr! wheeeeeeeeee!

ok, so this was our first attempt at this picture during the sounders game, and i swear a goal was about to be scored. kyle refused to take another after seeing the hilarious outcome. whatever, the guy in green behind us is with me...

me and the brothers k post-sounders

i've officially been to four sports games now since i started the list last fall, and it should be noted that when i wrote these goals i didn't intend to just, you know, stop doing certain things once i hit the mark. i'm sure i'll go to more games, just like i'm sure i'll see more than four more live shows in the next two years. those goals were really just a way to make sure i kept on doing fun stuff and wasted as little time sitting on the couch as possible. ... onward!

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day two hundred and forty-eight

i finished ender's game (#7) while waiting for my ferry to kingston the other day. since this one was recommended to me by quite a few friends i was really looking forward to it. and i did like it, but frankly not as much as i thought i would. maybe it had been built up too much and it couldn't have possibly met my expectations. or maybe it was too sci-fi for me. but the more i think about it, i think it's that my favorite books have always been relatable. maybe i would see something in one of the characters that made me reflect more deeply upon my own motivations. or the story would be built upon foundations i spend a lot of time thinking about already. ender's game was really neither of those for me, so i wasn't as excited to get through it as i have been with others, but the ending was beautiful. and there were a few good takeaways, the greatest of which concerned how we might learn to think of our enemies. perhaps my favorite line of the book:

"in the moment when i truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment i also love him. i think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."

a book about war revealed itself to be, in fact, about love. so it won me over.

day two hundred and forty-four

woah, one whole month has gone by nearly! it's been brought to my attention that i'm "woefully behind." but i was only slacking on the blogging part, really. i'm still doin' stuff.

#58: my second mix cd was for kyle, and it celebrated the conclusion of his GIS class and thus the official start of full-time fun. all the tracks had "sun," "summer," or some other such happy word in the title. this in fact happened nearly a month ago, but still, yay!

#70: i spent the recent holiday weekend camping on orcas island with some of my favorite people (eleven of them!) kyle and jake had the foresight back in january to reserve two campsites in moran state park for four days and three nights o' fun. an hour and a half drive north from seattle, another hour-long ferry ride from anacortes to orcas, followed by about forty-five minutes of quiet, windy-road driving got my car-full of campers there just in time for s'mores on friday night. we hiked, we played card games, we ate (a lot), we drank (even more) and had an all-around awesomely laidback time.

awesome tree (with jake and emy in it) about a half mile from our campsite

further along the hike - he jumped off that bridge shortly after. chris took pictures of all the jumpers from below and hopefully i can toss a shot or two up here