Me, Doug, and Russ in LA in July. Testing this out to see if I can really start posting pictures in my Blog!!! 

Life

Yeah, I have no clue what's going on in mine. And that's pretty much the moral of the story. I'm starting to feel like publishing a blog is maybe NOT the best idea in the world... I mean, you don't know who's reading it, and you don't really know what you're going to regret saying in the future! Everything changes so fast in life, and what you may say one day you may totally regret saying the next. Yes, you can edit or delete posts, but then everyone knows what you wish you didn't say, and that's just dumb now isn't it?

Such is life... :)

BOO

I kid you not, I wrote this great post last night that was not on my life at all, but rather quite amusing commentary about the Bachelor. I won't recreate it all because I spent the entire course of the show watching it, but this is the gist of my favorite part.

The Bachelor goes on and on about how he wants to find "unconditional love again" which I think is the biggest oxymoron in the world. If it was unconditional, why wouldn't you still have it? Why would you need to find it again? So then finally some girl challenges him on it, and he is like "yeah, well, it's hard to love someone who's never around". It's HARD?! Is that the best you can say? Of course! Marriage is hard! But unconditional love allows for hard... it allows for anything. HENCE, UN-conditional.

Whatever.

So much more to say... interesting things are happening. EXCITING things are happening... one could maybe even say ER nights are back. Since I know only about 20 people in the world know what that means, and no one from college or beyond, I'll just leave you with that. And that it's not with who you might think. :)

Slacker

Yup, I'm totally a slacker when it comes to my Blogging. I'm okay with that. See, here's the deal. I do nothing cool during the week when I'm at work. I guess that's the time when I should vent about random stuff and/or try to be funny. Maybe I'll make that a goal for this week. Check back tomorrow and see if there's another blog from me, then you'll know if it actually happened or not. But anyway, during the weekend I'm so busy trying to do cool stuff that I don't have time to sit around and tell you people about it! So here's the lowdown from this weekend:

Saturday: GREAT night. Went downtown to Barracuda with a bunch of random people. Had a great night -- met lots of fun folks, had a great time dancing, saw a few fights, and generally had all around fun. 4 stars for Saturday.
Sunday: The first church service held in the new sanctuary of Sunset! It was great! BUT, I didn't know that they had new start times!! The old 8:45 was now at 9 and the 10:30 was at 11. So I got there waaaay too early. It's okay, I just chilled and waiting for things to get going. In good news there is now a 5 PM service on Sundays which will be GREAT for me when I have to work on Saturday nights and really want that Sunday morning sleep. Also, the senior pastor was back from vacation and every year he sings a song about what he and his family did on vacation. They have 9 kids so it's always especially amusing. This was the 2nd year I had the chance to hear it, and I found out that he does it to the same tune every year. GOOD TIMES! Then my aunt and uncle and a friend of theirs was in town, so I had lunch with them, then gave them a tour of Intel and went to Tillamook, then had dinner at Thai Orchaid. Yuuumm. Sunday is 3 stars.
Monday: SUPER fun day. Went to Kristie's apartment, who is an OM on shift 6 (my job, my shift) in a different factory (right next door, I can walk to her cube in 2 minutes). She lives RIGHT near me, about a 1 minute walk! So we chilled there and then ended up going to Portland City Grill for happy hour -- AMAZING drinks and appetizers. If you come to visit me in Portland I promise to take you there and you will be VERY VERY happy I did, I think. You should be happy, anyway. It's a really great place. I can't wait to go back. Then we went to Geoff's house and played many board games with Geoff and Dave (some Hearts, then Settlers, then Puerto Rico). 4 stars for Monday
Tuesday: Another great one! Kristie had a dinner party with me and a few engineers who work in her factory. SUPER good food... she's a great cook! I went over and helped her out a little early, then we enjoyed great food, wine, company, and dessert. Then I met up with a woman on my shift in my factory and another woman who works the same shift, same job, in an entirely different factory for a late happy hour at Stanfords and then a late showing of The Bourne Supremacy. 4 stars for Tuesday!

Just an absolutely fabulous weekend... so great having 4 day weekends every other week now that I know what to do with them! And I didn't even mention the shopping I did, chocolate chip cookies I made, or all the reading I did for my new Book Club that meets at Kristie's next week (with a lot of IEs from my old group, YAY!). Definitely good times all around!

More soon. :) :)

So uncool!

So uncool = me.

Here's the thing. When one joins the working world, they just don't have as much of interest to discuss. I mean, when I was at school and enjoying the life of piledom, I always had Dena & Caroline antics to discuss, or whatever psycho thing Killian was doing at the moment. Now I'm like "uhhhh yeah, I worked, and then I slept. Then I worked. Oh yeah, and then I slept again." So yeah, Wednesday I worked during the day, then slept from about 3 PM - 9 PM, then worked from 12 AM - 7 AM. Then I slept and worked Thursday night from 6:00 PM - 7:30 AM Friday morning. HERE'S WHERE IT GETS FUN!

So most of you probably don't know that not all has been exactly stellar in Doug & Kelly land lately. To put all of the blame on him (ha), I'll just say that he does not handle this long-distance thing very well. Which is 100% accurate. We could say it's my fault for moving to Oregon or his for moving to LA, but in either case somewhere along the line we ended up 1000 miles away from each other (which actually is an improvement over the last 10 months). But somehow now it feels more permanent. He loves LA and I love Intel. I think he's just sort of realizing the enormity of all of that... and is freaking out. So all of this happened about a month ago (the beginning of him freaking out). About 2 weeks ago we talked about seeing each other for Labor Day and I went ahead and booked tickets. Then he realized this is like his only free weekend for over a month and was like "ummmm maybe you shouldn't come". So I spent most of Friday night (which I had off of work) talking to him and trying to figure out if I was going to LA Saturday morning or not. I kind of pushed (what can I say, I'm a pusher), and finally he was like "well, just do whatever you want". So I decided to go... I know, stupid decision. To make it even more fun, I had slept too late on Friday (I meant to sleep until 3 and I slept until 6) so I could NOT fall asleep at all on Friday night. So I take the bus and the train to PDX, get all checked in, etc, etc. Then they're like "uhhh the LA airport is closed due to a few security breaches". WHAT?!? So I call Doug and he's like "yeah, that's definitely a sign you shouldn't come" (sort of joking, sort of not). But I'm stubborn so I went anyway... my flight actually ended up being less than an hour late, luckily I was not flying United (where the breaches really took place and where there were TONS of delays). So Saturday we chilled a little bit and then hung out with a friend of his from work and his wife. We had SO much fun. We went to grab some lunch about 4 PM, then we played an insane amount of Halo and Tetris Worlds on XBox. I tried to take a nap (mind you I had not slept at all since 6 PM the day before since I couldn't sleep on the plane) but for some crazy reason I couldn't sleep still even though I was exhausted. About 10 PM we were starving again so we went to Denny's. After that we did a little bit of drinking and then they headed home. Doug and I talked for a little bit and went to bed around 2ish. Sunday was pretty chill... he had to pick up his cousin from the airport so we didn't get to go to church, but then we made some pancakes together. Then he had a guys night with his cousin since he hadn't seen him in 2 weeks so I went to a movie. He ended up spending the night at his cousin's house which was fine because I just fell asleep. Monday morning he came home and we ordered pizza at like 11 in the morning (yes I realize that's ridiculous but we were starving and didn't want to cook because it was hot). Then we chilled and watched tons of movies and TV, then we had a fabulous dinner and movie date. We went to PF Changs and then saw Wicker Park which we both LOVED. Very good movie. The night before I had seen Suspect Zero which was good but not as good as Wicker Park. Plus we loved seeing Wicker Park together because it brought us back to our roots and made us both miss Chicago a little bit. Don't get all excited though, we're still both West Coast people for life! (And I kid you not if you would have asked me if I'd EVER end up on the West Coast 2 years ago I would have told you no way, no how. It is insane that I'm here and love it so much!)

So things with Doug are okay. We've had a lot of fun this weekend but we still live 963.6 miles away from each other 90% of the time. I don't know what will happen, I guess only time will tell. Hopefully things will all work out and in any case I know that all things will work out for the best in a greater sense anyway. That's just not what I want to happen! We'll see. Tonight I'm going to hang out with Terry Miller which will bring me back to the good old days of Northwestern and the Elder Hall gang. If only Lucy could be here too. It should be a good time. Doug's hoping to tag along too since he loves meeting new people in LA. So hopefully that will be cool with Terry. I love Terry because he is the most chill and funny person I know. I expect nothing but a good time tonight. Tomorrow morning I'll be back on my LAX --> PDX route that I'm sure (hopefully) will become quite familiar soon, just as ORD --> LAX was once so typical of me. It will be interesting because I of course have to work tomorrow night so I need to try to get a few hours of sleep in on the plane and when I get home so that I can survive the night. I have a feeling Thursday morning is going to be some goooooood sleep. :)

So this weekend was a little bit more exciting than my weekends have been lately, mainly just because I have a partner in crime I guess. It sure does change things. Once fall starts and things at church get going and I see more of my old friends from Oregon and meet new ones, I think things will start to look up again too. I need a new singles group somewhere too... the one at my church is being a little weird lately and I'm not sure if it's right for me. We'll see! I'll keep you posted. To be honest I've been struggling a little bit lately and I feel very refreshed after this weekend and excited to go back and be more exciting. We'll see if that really happens. :) I can always put some more miles on Jake and go exploring the great Pacific Northwest.