Things that might be decidedly odd…

Mount Si and Snoqualmie Falls

I went hiking up Mount Si today. Click below to see the full post for details and lots of pictures.

Continue reading Mount Si and Snoqualmie Falls…

Mt. Vernon

On somewhat of a wild hair, I met up with some people I met online dinner tonight in Mt. Vernon. It was fun and hopefully I’ll hang out with them again some other time. Tomorrow is the second attempt at hiking Little Si. Gotta get up early for that, so I should be going to bed…

Swimming Update

I just realized I never blogged about my swimming plans for Friday… Anyhow, I showed up but nobody was there to let me in. I waited for a while before giving up and going home. Afterwards, I sent an email to the organizer and his response made it clear that I’d been waiting in the wrong place (doh). I’m going to try to go again on Wednesday. Hopefully, I’ll have better luck since I know where I need to be now.

Hike Aborted

I was going to go on a hike this morning with Outventures. However, because the weather outlook for tomorrow (0% chance of rain, possibly sunny) seemed a lot better than today’s (cloudy with 70% chance of rain), we decided to postpone until tomorrow. Still, we went and got breakfast, where I had some conversation with cool people. Definitely not a waste of my morning either way.

After getting back in my car to drive home from breakfast, I realized I was right over by Walgreens which sells the cleaning fluid cartridges for my electric razor. I got out of the car and started to walk over there when I felt something falling down my leg. Crap. I knew exactly what it was. Seconds later, a metal ball was on the sidewalk. I picked it up waiting for the rest of it to fall out. A little while later, I thought I felt something else but in the end I couldn’t see it anywhere on the pavement. Hence, I have now lost most of my curved barbell that I sometimes wear in my prince albert. This is all that remains:

I should really buy a new one I suppose, but it’ll require mail order as finding curved barbells with the larger balls necessary for a PA is somewhat difficult. Bummer. I need to remember to make sure the balls are screwed on tight more often.

Swimming for Longer

On Friday, I’m going to check out Orcas Master’s swim team to see what it’s like. In preparation over the past week or so, I’ve upped my workout time from my usual 30-40 minutes up to 45 minutes last week, 55 on Monday and then 65 last night. The practices are 75 minutes, so I figured it would be a good idea to gradually work my way up. On the upside, this means I’m swimming longer which is probably doing wonders for my endurance and health. On the downside, it’s harder to fit such a period of time into my work schedule. I end up going after work more now than in the middle of the day because it would be too much of a disruption I think to be gone for 1.5-2 hours in the middle of the day.

Domain Problems

My domain name didn’t get renewed the other day despite me having paid my webhost a few weeks ago. That of course stopped my site from showing up. The most annoying part is that the exact same thing happened last year. Fortunately, it’s all back up again.

Potluck

This afternoon, I went to the store to buy the ingredients for a key lime pie. Since it was such a nice day, I decided to walk over to QFC instead of driving to Safeway, figuring they would probably have the limes at QFC too. I looked around for a while before finding some limes marked “organic limes”. They looked to be about the size and shape of key limes, so I bought about a pound a half of them. While at QFC, I also discovered that my Kroger card (which I’ve only used like twice in my life on the rare occasion that I went grocery shopping in Durham where they have them) works at QFC for getting the discounts and what not. Fascinating.

After I get home and start making the pie, I discover quite quickly that the limes I’ve bought are most definitely Persian and not key limes. First, they’re slightly larger than key limes because they don’t fit in my garlic crusher. Second, they are WAY too juicy to be key limes because I only had to use about a third of the bag to get enough juice. Still, Persian lime pies tend to taste pretty good–they’re just less tart than key lime pie.

The pie was for the Outventures kick-off potluck. Eventually, I got ready and headed over to the potluck stopping at some Red Apple (a local grocery store I’d heard of) to pick up some whipped cream. The potluck was quite good actually. The people were friendly and it sounds like they’ll be doing lots of cool activities this year. I paid the $20 and signed up. There’s even a hike up Mt. Si this Saturday that I’d like to go on. It’s early in the morning though, which just gives me more of a reason to try to get on an earlier sleep and work schedule this week.

New Pictures

I finally got around to taking a picture of me with my new glasses. I look sleepy in this photo, but at least you can see the new glasses:

Also, on my way back from the post office (dropping off the movies I watched this morning), I took this shot which shows how clear and beautiful it is in Seattle today:

Friday Night, Saturday Morning

I go out on Friday night (for an hour) and I come home on Saturday morning (and watch movies). I’ll be very impressed if anybody gets this reference. Give up? Look here.

Anyhow, I was chatting with this guy (who I’d actually first seen and messaged on MySpace) last night. He said he was headed over to Purr for a bit and encouraged me to join him. I waited around a bit to finish up the chat I was having with Kendra, but ultimately decided to go. I didn’t see him at first because the bar was fairly dark inside and it’s hard to recognize somebody you only know from pictures. Eventually, he saw me wandering around though and got my attention. He was there with two friends (who are actually a couple). I chatted with all of them for while, which was nice. They all were pretty decent, nice guys. It was already fairly late when I got there being that I had left my apartment around midnight to begin the 10 minute or so walk over. By 1am, everybody decided to head their separate ways home. It was nice to get out even for just a short while. More importantly, I was fairly relaxed through the whole thing even though it’s not something I typically do (meet practical strangers for a bar on short notice).

This morning I got up fairly late, but decided I was going to watch movies, since I’ve really fallen behind on netflix lately. I’ve had four movies sitting on my desk for a while now. First, I watched Fire, which I’d been wanting to see since Steve, Jenn and I almost watched it months ago. It was good even with the slow pacing present in a lot of Indian films. Apparently, it was very controversial in India when it came out back in 1996, ultimately being banned by the Indian and Pakistani governments. After that, I watched Chuck & Buck. The movie was very creepy in general, although it became decidedly less so at the end, which I thought worked well. Overall, I liked the movie, but I didn’t like how the gay guy had to be the creepy perv with issues. Like I said though, it was still worth watching.

I have two more movies that I’m saving for tomorrow. Tonight, I’m planning to go out on the town with some people from work.

Jockish Updates

Today, I heard back from the Orca Swim Team people. It sounds like it could be just what I’m looking for. Apparently, Keenan has worked out with them in the past too and says they’re a good group. The guy I emailed told me if I wanted to come by some time to just try things out, they could arrange that without me having to pay any money or sign up for anything. I’m going to try and pick a date sometime next week and see how it works out.

In other news, Outventures is having an open potluck this Sunday so that new people can see what they’re all about. I think I’ll check this out too.

Man, I almost feel like a jock!