Cup o' Joe Monday: A Special Engagement

This week's Cup o' Joe is, again, actually a Cup o' Tea - and it comes to you from a very special space - i.e. the new apartment! Seyeon poses at our celebratory housewarming tea party:


Isn't her hair awesome?
This picture, obviously, was taken at night, so the bay windows behind her reflect more of the inside of the apartment. There will be more pictures in the future of the place, but not until Alan and I get some furniture moved in and everything organized and decorated. For now, it's just a heaping mess of boxes, and I'm camping out on the floor on a layer of memory foam with some quilts and pillows...so this photo shall suffice :)

Like my kitty cat (who will officially take up residence here sometime this week, too!), the tea pictured above hails all the way from Oberlin. It's funny how much emotional significance material goods take on once your concept of "home" gets thoroughly fuzzed up by so many moves and cross-country shifts in a short period of time. Anything from Kansas or Ohio fills with me an achy sort of calmness.

On a total sidenote, there are so many people I miss. The size of the world is an increasingly melancholy thing as I grow up and move around and meet more and more people, only to miss them all the more when we inevitably go our separate ways. So it goes?

Just learned I have to officially switch over my Kansas license and plates on my car in order to qualify for a residential parking pass to park on my own street here during the day...bummer. As excited as I am about having a Washington State license and Mount Rainier on the back of my car, I'll miss the ties to my home state.

(Despite the lack of writing about coffee this Monday, I must be honest: I've had coffee twice in two days...eep! Free Starbucks at the Keen clinic yesterday morning, and a tasty but overpriced "white velvet" at the previously-reviewed Espresso Vivace this morning to help power through my 8.5-hour Monday workday.)

But off the melancholy note, and onto a happy report of a wonderful hike I went on yesterday with a couple coworkers -> We climbed Little Si, a small mountain (big hill?) that stands humbly in the shadow of its respectable sister, Mount Si, just outside of North Bend...which is about a half hour's drive from downtown Seattle. The lush greens and autumn colors were incredible. + The rain held off until we'd made it back to the bottom and were on I-90 on our way back to Seattle.


  

Kate, Jeff, and me atop Little Si.
And so it was that my to-do list for yesterday could include: a morning clinic at work, a 4-hour hike, moving into the new apartment, getting takeout pho and watching a movie with Seyeon. Awesome.