the rest of Portland

So. Amy. Amy is so so so awesome (and so is her husband Clif!). We got there late Saturday, and spent a while talking to her about our lives and where we are and what we want to be doing, etc. It was really nice talking to her because even though she’s older than us, she is at a similar spot in her life, so we  all had a lot to relate to.

The next day, she made us waffles!! I guess her husband used to be a chef, so she definitely spoiled us with food the whole time we were there. I loved it. The weather that day was pretty rainy, but we decided to brave it and go on a hike in Forest Park. We walked up through basically a rainforest to this mansion at the top, then headed back down. We were pretty soaked by the end, but it was really beautiful and we all had a good time. Especially Copper, Amy and Clif’s mini-labradoodle. For dinner that night we went to a sushi place where they have a conveyor belt that goes all around the room, and you just grab what you want and eat it! It was kind of silly but fun to watch the plates go around and grab one really fast.

It moves!

I think every day we were there Amy made us something amazing and delicious for breakfast.  Clif had been on a business trip but he got back about half way through our trip and it was really nice to meet him. We spent a good chunk of time talking to them about things we wanted to do and the direction we wanted to be heading in and they asked us a lot of thought provoking questions and offered some good suggestions as well.

Hmm… what else did we do in Portland? (This is why I should write blog posts a lot sooner than I have been!) we went to voodoo doughnuts because I love doughnuts. I think Sam got a maple bar and I got a custard filled chocolate bar, and we got Amy and Clif a HUGE glazed doughnut.

And we got the traditional pink box…

We also visited a yarn store (Twisted, one I hadn’t been to before but I really liked!) where I saw this sweet poster.

Annnd we went to this bar where their specialty is sour beer (Don’t ask me) which was interesting but not my favorite. The smell was a little overpowering when you walked in. But I did convince Sam to try knitting in a bar… Now I’m not the only one! (He’s wearing a fireman hat because it was halloween.)

The day we left we headed out to Multomah Falls first, which neither of us had been to. We didn’t have a ton of time so we just hiked to the top of the falls (which was enough for me, the number of switchbacks was misleading!!) and got a great view of the falls and the Columbia, if I remember correctly. We got to see some salmon in the stream at the very very bottom, but they were pretty hard to see so I don’t think I took any pictures of them. But I did take a lot of pictures of the waterfall!

looking over the edge at the top of the waterfall

bridge of the gods or something like that

And then we headed to Seattle!

resolutions

So here’s the thing. I LOVE making resolutions. I usually make a list of them at the beginning of the year, and yeah I kind of forget about them by the end, but I also cheat a bit and make some of my resolutions be things I would do anyways.

Here are my resolutions from last year:

1. Plan a rough meal for every week
2. Pay off at least $1,000 dollars of student loans, and try to do at least half before I graduate
3. Get at least half an hour of exercise at least 2 times a week
4. Start looking for a job for after graduation as soon as I figure out the living situation
5. Move in with Sam by October!!

I also had some knitting resolutions, but we’ll keep those off of here for now.

I did okay with my resolutions…

1. I kind of did a meal plan but not super consistently. I did look at some cook books and make meals from them though!
2. I paid off over $1,000 dollars of my students loans (probably closer to $2,000 now, which means I’ve paid off 10ish percent of them. Not too bad for someone who hasn’t worked since August and only worked full time for 3 months out of the year!
3. Didn’t exercise consistently over the year, but there were definitely some month long good phases. And I did some longer bike rides this summer, which was something new and fairly enjoyable for me.
4. I spent a lot of time looking for a job after the summer but I still don’t have one. Still working on this.
5. Moved TO Sam, and we are finally about to move in somewhere. The adjustment to being together all the time hasn’t been too bad so far, but we will see what living in a studio apartment is like.

So my resolutions for 2012 are:

1. Sit and stand up straighter
2. Sell things I’ve knit in a store
3. Get a job
4. Pay off at least 1/3 of my student loans this year (preferably more, but I’m trying to be reasonable)
5. Knit at least 5 sweaters this year. (I’m going to count ones I started last year, so I already finished 1!)
6. Go back to Alaska
7. Talk to friends more often

Everyone says you are more likely to work on/accomplish your resolutions if you tell people about them so here you go!

 

 

keep Portland weird

after Bend, we made a quick stop in Salem to see my friend Mara!! I met Mara in Denmark, but she is from Anchorage and goes to school in Salem (obviously).

Maraaaa!

Then we headed to Portland, where we visited MANY different people. First we saw Sam’s friend Alyssa, who he lived with in the dorms. Alyssa is super awesome and really really nice, so it’s always fun to see her again. Unfortunately we got to Portland fairly late.  There was an incident that involved getting lost, me not knowing how to use the google maps app on my phone to its full potential, us realizing we were going the wrong direction but not being able to turn around, Sam yelling obscenities out the window because he hates getting lost, and me getting rather fed up with Sam yelling and driving with the window down when it was late at night in Portland.

BUT we ended up at Alyssa’s! She had to go to work the next morning so we met her for lunch at the FOOD CARTS! Now, everyone who has been to Portland knows about the food carts, but if you’ve never been let me tell you about them. THEY ARE AWESOME!! Basically it’s a bunch of people who have small carts that they sell food out of. They line up along the sidewalk for two or three blocks and you have tons and tons of choices. This might not sound too amazing but they have tons and tons of delicious food from around the world that I could never make as well as people from that particular place could. In the past I have gotten Mediterranean food and Thai food, but this time I headed to the Korean cart and got some Bulgogi. It was delectable. I think Sam got Filipino food, which was also pretty good. The other cool thing about the food carts is that everyone goes there, so you will see homeless people standing next to dudes in three-piece pinstripe suits.

While we were walking, we went past what looked like a demonstration, so we headed back that way to check it out. It turned out to be a protest/demonstration/lecture series put on by Pink Martini. I don’t think it was technically part of Occupy Portland, but I think it was associated with it. I don’t really want to yap about the whole Occupy movement, because it’s kind of over now and also because I feel like I don’t know enough about it, but my main problem with it is that it is incredibly broad. So I really enjoyed the Pink Martini thing because they had a lot of different people talking about specific issues.

Then we spent some time at Powell’s. I of course checked out the knitting books, and Sam of course checked out the climbing/mountaineering books. We ended up staying for a while, grabbed some dinner, and then went BACK to Powell’s so I could see the Yarn Harlot!! She was doing a reading of her new book, All Wound Up, and Sam was awesome enough to find some books to read while I listened to her/waited in line to show her my socks. I also snagged the last copy of her new book, which was exciting for me. After one of the coolest things ever, we headed to a Mcmenamin’s to meet Jamie, one of my old roommates. We stayed with her family for the night, and her mom gave me an awesome haircut (that was very badly needed, because I think the last time I got my hair cut was in July of 2010).

The next day we stayed at Jamie’s for a while, and another former roommate, Amber, came by! (and Jamie’s boyfriend Mason was there.) It was fun for me to catch up and hear about what our friends from Whitworth are doing now. Then we went bowling! We only got to bowl a game and a half, but it was quite fun for me because I won the first game! (I won and Sam lost, which is very surprising because usually when things involve any kind of physical activity Sam ALWAYS beats me!) After bowling we grabbed some pizza, and then we headed out to northeast Portland (I think) to stay with Sam’s friend Amy. But I think I will start another post since this is getting quite long…

Bend!!

Bend, Oregon is an amazing place. I just need to be up front about that. Sam and I LOVED Bend. This portion of our trip started a little panic-inducing because we had no idea where we were going to stay. We don’t know anyone in Bend, and it was getting cold enough that I would have been extremely unpleasant and probably pretty mean the whole time if we had camped. So we decided to try out couch surfing.

For those of you who don’t know, couch surfing is this website where you sign up, either offering your couch or traveling around. If you’re traveling you can contact people and ask them if they want to host you. They aren’t allowed to charge for it, but other than that it is totally up to the host. The people we stayed with hosted couch surfers all the time, and they will forever be awesome in my book because they responded to our extrememly short notice request, and because they had a bed for us to sleep in!
We stayed super close to downtown, which meant that we walked around quite a bit and visited several breweries. Obviously we had to go to Deschutes, because Black Butte Porter is one of my favorite beers, but we also went to Bend Brewing Co, which I thought had better beer. But they both had super good food, and the beer wasn’t too bad either.

The tiling in the bathroom

One unique aspect to Bend is that there is a pretty decently sixed butte in the middle of town. I guess when they were building the town they thought it would be too hard to get rid of it, so they just left it as is. There is a road so you can drive up to the top, and there is also a well maintained trail for walking. However, for whatever reason we didn’t want to walk all the way around the butte, so when we didn’t see a big trail we took this extremely dusty, mostly likely animal path STRAIGHT up to the top. Obviously there are other ways I would have preferred to get up the hill. BUT we made it to the main trail, and then made it to the top, without too much huffing and puffing. It was pretty clear so we got an awesome view of the surrounding area. There are signs that point out all the major natural landmarks, which I found quite helpful.

One view from the Butte

And another!

We also went on a hike near Mt. Bachelor. The people we were staying with recommended we do a hike out Green Lake (Green Lakes?), which was about 8 miles round trip. It was a beautiful hike, even though I found it a little long. I blame my short legs. We passed a two different groups of oldish people hiking, which tells you something about the people who live around Bend.

Waterfall!!

we really loved the waterfall

This tree was VERY strange looking and slightly inappropriate

A problem (and some pictures)

So, I have a problem. A white girl, first world problem that isn’t really a problem. My problem is that I am trying to figure out what to do with my life and I have TOO MANY options, yet, NOT ENOUGH at the same time. Let me tell you, it is a terrible problem, but also a very stupid problem.

Sam and I in Point Arena, CA

There are several parts to this problem and I will carefully explain them all to you. The first problem is that I moved to my boyfriend, and we are moving somewhere new together. Now, this may not seem like a problem (it probably seems quite exciting to most of you, and I will be the first to say the 2.5 year long distance part was a bigger and more upsetting problem) BUT, it is a problem. Because it is a lot harder to make life changing plans when you have to factor in two people. It is especially hard when you have to make life changing plans with two people who have very few plans to lead them to make other plans. I have a better idea of what I want to do then Sam does, but quite often I find myself thinking about other careers or jobs or other things I could do.

Some clouds at Pyramid Lake

Which leads to my second white girl, first world problem. I knew from a very early age (middle school) what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a journalist. I continued to want to do this through out high school, and even did some various internships and even GOT PAID to do what I wanted. And then I went to college and decided to major in journalism. While I was there I worked for the newspaper, which let me tell you had horrible hours and even more horrible pay, but I still liked it! I still wanted to be a journalist even though I knew I would still have horrible hours and kind of horrible pay (I am a pretty cheap person, so I think I could easily live on 20,000 a year, so the pay doesn’t seem to terrible now). And then I graduated from college with a degree in journalism and I STILL wanted to be a journalist.

But see, the problem is that there aren’t very many journalism jobs, and even fewer entry level journalism jobs. There are probably lots of unpaid things I could do, but even though I am a cheap person I can’t live off nothing. So this problem has two parts. The first part is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to do what I want. And the second problem is that sometimes I feel like I should do something else (or I want to do something else) because of the first part of the problem.

Lunch break from this summer!

Which leads me to the next problem. TOO MANY OPTIONS. There are so many random jobs all over the world that I could potentially have. There are jobs in Russia. Jobs in South Dakota. Jobs on the East Coast. Jobs everywhere. And there are so many places I would like to see or visit or live. So how can I pick just one place? And honestly, the idea of having one job that I go to five days a week for eight hours a day is not always the most appealing thing. So how do I deal with that? Or how do I find another job that isn’t five days a week eight hours a day in an office? How do I find a job that is so flexible that I can go with my boyfriend and hang out at base camp while he climbs a mountain? Or lets me go home and see my family in far away Alaska without using all my vacation time? So even though there are lots of options, at the same time I feel like I have no options. Sam and I have pretty much picked where we are going to try to live, but there aren’t really any jobs I want there! I don’t want to be a caretaker, or a nail salon person, or a retail associate, so if I move to ONE place, how do I find a job I like? How do I pay my rent (and more importantly, MY STUDENT LOANS) if I don’t find a job I like? How do I feel good about myself, like I am a productive member of society who is making a difference if I work at Target even though I have a college degree?

Sometimes I feel totally hopeless about everything. I am jealous of my friends who have jobs, or who are still in school, or who are going back home to live with their parents. But then I think about how I am finally growing up and I am creating my own life, and I am doing some pretty awesome things! In the past six months, I have been to six different states! I went on this awesome road trip with my boyfriend, and we saw so many people and so many cool things! So I don’t want to give that up. I just want to know what to do with my life. And I would also like some money to pay for my student loans, and maybe a pair of frye boots. That’s all!

(This post has probably been influenced quite a bit by natthefatrat.com since I read like 5 pages of her blog posts today. Just F Yer I, as my friend Greta would say!)

Eugenie-weenie

We went to Eugene to visit the platonic love of my life, Sara! Here is a picture of Sara if you don’t know who she is:

Hee hee!

She is still going to school here, so I figured we would get one last visit in (which actually turned into two, because we are once again in Eugene!) before she left. Anyways, when Sara first got to UO, she always called Eugene Eugenie-weenie. Don’t ask me why.

(I’m kind of having a hard time remembering what we did in Eugene because it was so long ago. Whoops!) We….

• ate a lot of good food.
• went to two different Mcmenamins ( I have no idea if I spelled this right)
• utilized the Agate Alley wheel (every Thursday night they spin a wheel with different drinks on it, and whichever drink it lands on is 2.50. We got really delicious pints of beer for 2.50!)
• visited the saturday market, which was awesome
• went to a pumpkin patch!!!
• saw my old roommate Amber and her boyfriend Devin!

We stayed with Sara for about 4 days I think, and it was a pretty fun and relaxing time, especially after our long hike and nights of cold or wet camping. Her roommates are also quite nice–one of them made us blueberry and chocolate chip pancakes!

I am totally obsessed with fall colors, and trees. This one was at the Saturday Market!

Corn maze!!

walking through the peach/nectarine orchard

Mini pumpkins

There were fields and fields of tomatoes, and it looked like a lot of them were just rotting

Chicken! Rooster?

Sam and I also got an insight to what it’s like to go to a DI school, because two of Sara’s roommates are on the tennis team. I think this was more surprising for me than for Sam, since he A. went to a bigger school than me, and B. knows other athletes who go/went to big schools. I was kind of amazed by how much free stuff they got, and simultaneous confused by all the weird rules they had, mostly about clothes. For someone who doesn’t really do any organized sports and would also rather spend money on yarn instead of work out gear, being required to only wear certain brands seemed weird and dumb to me. But I get it, when you go to a DI school where sports are REALLY important AND you are sponsored by a major company you aren’t going to do anything to piss them off.

If you’re wondering about current plans, we’re in Eugene til Wednesday and then we are driving down to San Francisco with some of our friends for thanksgiving!

Job funk

I’m going to go ahead and say it, looking for jobs sucks. On this trip a lot of the people we have visited are still in college, and hanging out with them makes me wish I was still in college, for a couple different reasons. The main reason is because everything seemed a lot easier when I was in college. Yeah I had classes to go to and papers to write, but I had a paying job that I didn’t have to worry about losing, even when I went abroad for a semester. And I was in class for a maximum of 4-6 hours a day.

I worked full time this summer, and it was pretty lame, mostly because I was busy and what I was doing wasn’t something I wanted to be doing for a long time. Buuuut I was getting paid, and it was only for three months, so I wasn’t going to complain much. Now that I’m looking for a long term job though, working full time seems kind of daunting. But so does not having any money.  Right now I don’t have any kind of job, so having no money seems a lot worse than working full time at a job I don’t really like.

I don’t want this post to seem whiny, because I’m really glad that I get to travel around the Pacific Northwest and see old friends, but sometimes (like right now) it seems like I will never find a job doing something I like. More often then not, it just seems like I will never find a job.

But even as I write this, I’m getting ready to drop off my resume and clips at several places around Bellingham. And I love Bellingham! So who knows, maybe I just need to get off my ass and DO something.

Crater Lake

I’ve gotten pretty behind in blogging, so who knows how much I can actually remember from this part of the trip, but that’s okay.

Anyways, after Ashland we drove to Crater Lake. I drove some, which was a lesson in patience for both of us. ( Sam has a stick, and I don’t like driving much anyways and hate/can’t drive a stick.) The first night we camped out in this random area before you get to the lake (south of it). There was a lot of wood and a rough fire circle there already, so we got to have a campfire! This means we a. weren’t freezing as soon as it got dark and b. could actually see something after it got dark. ( On previous camping trips we didn’t have any firewood and pretty much got in our sleeping bags as soon as it got dark (between 7 and 8 p.m.) and played 20 questions.) I got to knit some, which is always exciting, and Sam got to work on his fire-making skills. There was this weird freak rain/hail storm during the night, which was a bummer because it woke us up and because a ton of water got between the tent and the tarp so a lot of our stuff got wet. We were convinced there would be terrible weather the next day but it was really sunny when we got up so we were able to dry out our stuff!

Before we went to the lake we stopped at the visitors center and watched this movie about the history of the lake, with a focus on the culture surrounding it. If you don’t know anything about Crater Lake, it was formed by a volcano erupting and then collapsing in on itself. The eruption was supposed to be something like 15 times the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens, (which was also pretty massive) and obviously totally freaked out the native living in the area. (They thought the volcano was an angry God.) The lake had a lot of different names, and was kind of a myth for a while until it became easier to see. The funniest part of the video was that a lot of the people who saw it early on thought that people would never ever make it down to the water because the sides were so steep, and then once they did make it to the water they thought the lake had no bottom.

Sam and I did a couple of short hikes/walks along the lake while we were there. One was up Watchman’s Peak, where they have a wild fire look out. It was almost directly in front of Wizard Island, so that was pretty cool to see.

And then we walked down to the shore, which seems easy on the way down and quite long on the way up. After that we drove out of the park and wandered around looking for a spot to camp. We finally found one after kind of offroading for a bit (there are a TON of back roads in the area!)

The next day we climbed Mt. Thielsen! (well, Sam climbed the whole thing, I made it like 3/4 of the way up.) It was pretty easy for the most part, but once you crossed the PCT it got a lot steeper and rockier. My hips had been bothering me the steeper it got, and I’m not much for rock climbing anyways, so I headed back while Sam went the rest of the way up. He thought he would catch up with me on the way down, but I was getting fed up with hiking so I was walking back as fast as I could, so Sam ended up running back a lot faster than he was anticipating, ha.

The trail up was really interesting–there were portions where almost all the trees in the area had fallen down, and we couldn’t really figure out why. At first we thought they had been cut down, and then we thought maybe there was an avalanche, and then we thought there was some sort of tree parasite, but we don’t actually know what happened.

I thought the pine needles looked like starbursts

The beginning

We left Reno on Sunday after spending the morning doing some packing and the afternoon figuring out how everything was going to fit in the car. We decided to split the back seat in half so our stuff wouldn’t get all mixed up, and so far it’s working pretty well. My half is full of clothes and yarn, and Sam’s half is full of running shoes and food. How fitting.

We camped in Burney Falls State Park, just off the main road. It was a nice little area and luckily for us it wasn’t very cold. We woke up to a lot of mist in the morning- it was rather eerie.

Then we drove to Ashland! The weather was clear so we got a great view of Shasta.

Sam had wanted to climb Shasta, but there was a freak snowstorm the week before we left, so when he talked to the rangers there they said the trail conditions were pretty bad. We met Sam’s friend Ryan, and then the three of us went on a pretty sweet hike.

I feel like I need to preface this by saying that while I am in decent shape, and am pretty capable when it comes to hiking, I am short. So climbing has never really been easy for me. And I was with two boys who both run everyday and are really into hiking.

The hiking part was easy. The trail goes up for a bit and you cross the Pacific Crest Trail then keep going. Then it got a lot steeper, with more loose dirt, so we really had to watch our footing. Eventually we started clambering up piles of loose rock. This was fine, we just had to make sure we didn’t dislodge any rocks that could hit anyone under us. Finally we got to the actual rock, which was where I had some trouble.

Both Sam and Ghelfi were super awesome about helping me up, and the view from the top was totally worth Ghelfi having to basically pull me up one of the steps, haha. (damn you short legs and lack of upper body strength!)

Shasta and Ghelfi

The downhill slope after the loose rocks (everyone almost ate it several times going down this)

Here are a few more gratuitous photos of Pilot Rock.

After the hike we ate a huge amount of tacos and we carved pumpkins with Ghelfi and his roommates! David (who I will always think of as mustache because of his well groomed mustache) and Ghelfi carved a drunk pumpkin, razor carved their school mascot, and I carved a ball of yarn. We found out Ghelfi hadn’t carved a pumpkin in quite a while and was grossed out by pumpkin innards, so of course we made him handle them as much as possible! I spent a long time on my pumpkin, and Sam and Ghelfi spent a longtime drinking beer and geeking out about mountains and mountain climbers.

Well, its been a while

And things have dramatically changed since the last time I posted. For one, I’m not in Denmark. I’m not in Spokane or in Fairbanks either! Right now I’m in Reno, NV with Sam, staying at his moms house. I left Fairbanks mid September, and spent a weekend in Seattle before flying to San Francisco, where I met Sam. We spent a week in Point Arena, CA, then went to San Francisco, then came to Reno. We’re getting ready to leave on a west coast-ish road trip this weekend.

This summer I had an internship withand I babysat four girls. The most important thing I got out of the internship was that politics is not really my thing, but babysitting was pretty awesome. I watched 2 of the girls longer than the other two, and I miss them!

Here are some photos for you all:

Alaskan sunsets

 

two trees fell down in our yard

 

so we had to stack and split a lot of wood

 

we went on a bike pub crawl (this picture was taken at like, 11)

 

Isabelle (wearing a sweater I knit) and Emily pretending to knit

 

I went Berry picking on Murphy Dome!

 

Cranberries!

Okay, I think that’s enough photos for now. I had a good summer, and now that I’m not in Fairbanks I really miss it. But that is to be expected. I’ve been having a good time traveling, but we’ve been at Sam’s mom’s house for about three weeks now and that has gotten pretty old. It’s been a REALLY long time since I haven’t been around my friends on a regular basis, and it is definitely getting to me. So I’m excited for the road trip. Also, the job situation seems rather bleak and frustrating, but that’s another story.