My first bridal shower

This past weekend, I attended my first bridal shower! I was so nervous because the dress code was "white or neutral colors" and I don't ever wear white... and rarely wear neutrals! I'm all about blacks and blues and the occasional neon. Fortunately, I was able to get a neutralish outfit together (after two failed shopping trips looking for a white dress) and I wasn't the only one not wearing a white dress. Phew!

We enjoyed some delicious sangria and SO MUCH good food!!! Geez, the desserts were like a meal alone! After lunch we played trivia, about how well we knew the couple/bride. I had to guess for a lot because I haven't known Eric and Lorraine for as long as the other guests, but I got a few right!!! It was a lovely outdoor party on a sunny day with beautiful grass and a small garden around us. It was wonderful!

Watching Lorraine open gifts was pretttyyyy hilarious, especially the lingerie gifts. :) Her eyes lit up whenever she opened something for the kitchen, and she looked VERY excited for the hand blender. I didn't even think about gift opening so I shipped her gift directly to her from the registry.. oops! I know for next time now...

I don't have many girlfriends, and I'm really happy to have been included in the bridal shower. I had so much fun! And I felt all of the love and excitement for an upcoming wedding. I'd only hope to have 1/3 the attendees if I ever have a bridal shower. And everyone was so nice!

Personal Space (II)

Shortly after finishing my previous blog post, I shut my computer down and got all cozy in bed. I fell asleep promptly. Celine is coming over to my apartment tomorrow, and I'm pretty excited to have her over. No one in my family has seen my apartment in Seattle, so naturally I want it to be clean and fresh. I started cleaning after work on Friday already, and was planning to wake up a few hours early to finish cleaning Saturday morning.

After going out for dinner, I decided to stay home because I wanted to be rested so I could wake up and clean. After all, waking up before noon on a Saturday is a difficult and unusual task for me... and that's when I'm expecting Celine. So at 4 something in the morning, Matt and a friend come stumbling in making noises and talking loudly. I didn't know anyone was staying over, but fine whatever. It's not the first time. Matt comes into the bedroom and turns the light on to change. The light REALLY wakes me up. And I'm having a bizarre dream about JR having put Forrest into the washing machine for a bath. I'm slightly irritated but fine with it; I'm less irritated because I'm still trying to figure out why JR put Forrest in the washing machine. I get up to use the bathroom - oh no I can't because someone is in there. I wait a few minutes, and I really have to pee. He's still in there. I realize he's not coming out any time soon, so I have to use the bathroom in the lobby which is 3 floors down. I run down there to use it, run back up, and now I'm fucking wide awake. I toss and turn for an hour, and listen to puking sounds coming from the bathroom (that I just cleaned today, btw) angrily. Matt is passed out like a baby on the couch, the other one was sleeping on the toilet with the door open last time I checked, and no one turned any of the lights off.

So here I am, at 5:30 AM, unable to sleep. I'm getting up in a few hours to finish cleaning, and possibly to re-clean depending on the damage, and I am SO UNHAPPY. I recalled venting about room mate problems a few years ago via blog, so I looked up the old post. After reading through that, I've come to realize that I've made some progress in the past two years but not enough. For example, Matt now asks me 75% of the time before inviting people over, which is an improvement for sure. However, I think he should have given me some heads up that we were having a guest tonight, or known that maybe since I didn't go out with them maybe I didn't want to be waken up at 4:00 AM. And he knows that I use the restroom throughout the night. I think I've been too "cool" with everything up until now, and I'm paying the price.

And then there's the fact that I'd rather have our guest crash here drunk and causing a disturbance than driving home and getting a DUI. Obviously. And because I've made it clear that friends are welcome to crash here, I can't blame friends for doing so. Ultimately, I guess it's my fault. But this is fucking ridiculous. I can't sleep early and stay asleep in my own home, and I couldn't even use my own bathroom. This is so fucking ridiculous.

Wedding season is coming...

I just wrote up a long post about my upcoming weddings, but it magically disappeared after publishing. Hmph.

Anyhoo, up until now I had only been to 3 weddings that I can remember (since I'm not sure if I should count the weddings I attended at a young age). My first wedding reception was for Carrie and Long, my first ceremony and reception combo was for My and Ya, and then I attended another combo ceremony and reception for Matt's cousin's wedding in LA recently. And up until now, I've heard many people talk about the phase in life where all of your friends get married within a short span of time. I always thought to myself that it sounded so fun and exciting! Now that I've reached this infamous phase... it is actually stressful and very expensive. -____-

From now through the end of the year, I have 6 weddings to attend - 3 of which are in SF. Yikes! Geoff and Thea are having a black tie formal wedding next week, which will be exciting because everyone will be all fancy! The rest of the weddings (Christina/Victor, Lorraine/Eric, Lisa/Quanh, Anna/Everett, and Cindy/Thomas) will probably be regular wedding attire... I hope. Between finding dresses and accessories, planning trips back and forth to attend the events, buying gifts, and my family trip in October, I am so freaking stressed out. And overspending. I know that it's worth every penny because I don't want to miss the happiest moments in my friends' lives *cue the waterworks* but this is probably my most expensive year yet. It's nice to have pretty dresses, though, but really hard to find dresses that I love without spending too much. I have 3 new dresses so far, and no accessories... LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL!

Clam out with your clam out!

Went clamming again! This time we went to Double Bluff Beach on Whidbey Island, and it was just as fun.

Forrest had a grrrrrreat time, and I'm pretty sure he had a lot of "firsts" that day. When we got on the Mukilteo-Clinton ferry, his tail went WILD. And he got the crazy eyes!

Sadly, dogs aren't allowed on the passenger decks so we hung out near the car. No worries though, only a 20 minute ferry ride to the island. When we got to the beach, there was a music festival setting up, and we were really lucky to be there early. At 10:00 AM the parking lot was already full, and we parked about 20 cars down the road from the park entrance. The walk out to the water was nice, lots of ocean life to see. And Forrest got to run free!

In fact, at one point, he was so excited to see the crabs that he turned into a sloth!!!!

When he didn't have other dogs to play with in the area, Forrest was poking his nose into crab bellies... that is, until he got snipped by one! He didn't play with crabs after that. =) There was lots of sniffing and exploring happening for Forrest while we dug for clams. Matt was on rake duty, I was on trowel duty, and Mel was on shovel duty. We poked around for a while before we found the sweet spot where all of the clams were hanging out. It was near the shell/rocky land, just like at Dosewallips! We ended up finding PLENTY of large horse clams but no other kind of clam. Although, I kept finding enormous mollusks - like the size of my head!

We certainly each caught our limits, and hauling the large horse clams back to the car was.... a gruesome trek. It was a good workout though, hopefully burned enough calories to make up for the chowder binge in advance!

Cleaning horse clams was... not fun. Matt was particularly bad at it, so I ended up doing almost all of our share of the haul. It must have taken well over an hour to get through all of them! And my hands and arms were tired already.

We seared some of the precious tongue meat and seasoned it with sesame oil, soy sauce, and chili paste for "dinner". We were too exhausted to do any real cooking. It was good though, almost like sashimi!

Today I made chowder with the rest of the clam meat, and oooooooh booooooy we have chowder for daaaaaays! I think I *may* have overdone it when eyeballing the measurements for this recipe...

After I packed two soup bowls for the freezer, and after we both ate dinner, we still have plenty of chowder left.

Aaaaaand a close up.

I'm pretty proud of myself for this "living off the land experience" -- dug 'em out, cleaned 'em, cooked 'em up, and now I ate 'ems!!!!