My Life in Boxes, Again + Oberlin Run-in of the Week

Time for a semi-long, semi-reflective entry again, it seems.

I love the night. There's something really peaceful to me about night time, after the sun's gone down and the stores have shut down and the people have gone to sleep and I no longer have a to-do list hanging over me...there's just something lovely about it. Music sounds better; books are more capable of enveloping me in their worlds; my journal entries are more thoughtful; incense smells better; tea is downright fantastic...I just feel at peace.

I've been on such an early schedule kick here that I haven't capitalized much on night times. It's happening tonight, though, due to a crazy busy schedule this week - covering several extra shifts at work for people since flu season has hit Seattle, as well as midterms for many people in school...as well as securing the new apartment, putting in epically long training runs for the marathon, and trying to cram in some nice social time, too. Having a full day planned for tomorrow too (walk to work + early a.m. Keen clinic + late morning hike with coworkers + afternoon/evening Move-In-to-the-New-Place, Phase I), packing tonight has been imperative.

So after an 8-hour work day and a long, luxurious dinner with some old family friends of Seyeon's (sushi appetizers + fresh halibut + delectable Indian dishes + white wine + tea and sorbet for dessert = yum!), I've spent tonight packing for what feels like the twentieth time in the last few years. (After having consulted my memory for a more specific number, I've come up with "14" for number of times I've moved in 5 years - so 20 wasn't so far off the mark after all...hmm.) Coupled with the night time, the whole packing process (naturally, right?) is putting me in a deeply reflective mood.


This again?
First of all, I still can't believe how much junk I have. You'd think that after so many moves in so little time, I'd have all my stuff pared down to a sparse few essentials. And yet packing still feels like a bit of a nightmare every time I do it. Assuming all goes well with the new place, it will be such a huge relief to just be settled for a while - get rid of all the crap I've dragged from place to place to place and never apparently used, and begin acquiring real furniture and artwork and kitchen utensils, rather than using cardboard boxes as night stands and posters to decorate my walls and mooching other people's cheese graters. I'm thrilled!

Move-In-to-the-New-Place, Phase II will happen later in the week, when Alan gets back into town, and we can go claim the rest of the stuff in the storage unit (furniture, yay!) and probably at that point, if not earlier, my beloved kitty cat Chloe! Chloe's been staying with my friend Kyle down in Olympia all this time - both of whom, notably, I visited earlier this week. Had a blast hanging out in downtown Olympia with him and his friend Katie, sampling Northwest microbrews, cooking a bunch of late-night yummy food and catching up for lost time.

At work today, one of my coworkers grabbed me in the back stockroom and was like, "Hey, there's some guy out there who's moving to Ohio and is shopping for winter boots...you want to handle this one?" Turns out the guy was a freshman at Oberlin, at home in Seattle on fall break, and shopping to prep for his first Ohio winter. It was fun to chat with an Obie for awhile, and help him buy the boots I should have gotten four years ago, rather than braving through four of those seasons with sub-par footwear.

More soon, including pictures - of the moving process and also hopefully what's apt to be an awesome, albeit rainy, hike with coworkers tomorrow!

It's a small world.

Anyone who followed my study-abroad+travel blog may recall the fact that I ran into other Obies on three separate occasions during my weeks that I backpacked through Europe - at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, at a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant in Prague, and on my late-January flight back to the states out of Paris (both of us were in the middle leg of our flight connections home; she, from Madagascar on to Colorado, me from Amsterdam on to Kansas.)

Well, it's happening again. As I was walking down a random street in Seattle a few days ago, I passed a quaint little coffeehouse with an outdoor terrace, and there, working on his laptop, was an intramural soccer buddy of mine from Oberlin. Neither of us are originally from Seattle, so running into each other here was rather miraculous. I was in no rush, so I stopped there to have a muffin with him and catch up our respective post-Oberlin lives. Awesome.

He mentioned to me that there was going to be an Oberlin alumni picnic here this weekend. Though he couldn't make it himself, I navigated my way over to the beautiful Lincoln Park of West Seattle on Saturday. I couldn't find the group right away, so I wandered awhile before stumbling across them - and in doing so, determined the park to be my new favorite running/hiking/swimming spot so far.

The water, lined with mountains (difficult to see in this picture, but they're there...), is of course stunning:


And the woods, too:


And everything after that as well:


The picnic itself was good fun. Great weather, yummy food, lots of new people to meet from all generations of graduating classes, ranging from 1951 to recently admitted students who will start Oberlin in the fall. Also ran into at least one old, familiar friend from a brief overlap in Harkness (food co-op) several years ago. Very nice way to spend an afternoon.

Then, yesterday, I drove down to Olympia to vist two of my favorite friends from high school - Kyle and Allison. Kyle is working on an organic farm out here this summer, and Allison's in town with family to visit Kyle. The drive to Olympia alone is worthy of mention: no photos, but my first real look at Mount Rainier was amazing - a huge rainbow crested the top of it for several minutes of my drive, and I'm still in awe of how surrounded the highways are with towering evergreens, mountain ranges, views of the bay...

The three of us drove out to a...house? farm? ranch?...in the middle of nowhere, out in the genuine sticks. A sizeable plot of land, and upon arrival, we were immediately recruited to help bale hay.


A good group of the PSA-ers, as they're known, (Practice of Sustainable Agriculture) was gathering to have a big food-and-feel-good fest, involving all of the following: bread-baking lessons, informal composting demonstrations, vegetable seed planting, chicken coop building, guacamole, chili, coleslaw, and pasta making, cooking fresh jams on the stove from blueberries and blackberries the PSA-ers had picked in wild bogs earlier that day, football in the living room with a giant squash, self-brewed beer and homemade fermented wine imbibing, guitar and bongo drum circles on the back porch, and stargazing.

Aaand...turns out two of the PSA-ers are Obies as well! That was a fun coincidence. (Also, didn't mention it in the blog, but one of Shari's other ranger-intern friends at Glacier was an Obie, too! They're everywhere.) The skies in Washington are huge, like the Midwest, except here they're framed with mountains and trees instead of flat horizon.


The sunset took over the entire sky canvas above us, coloring all the clouds, lacing the tops of the evergreens like gossamer. Once it got dark, thousands of stars were visible, and save the happy din of acoustic guitar and conversation, stillness reigned. It was beautiful!


It was inspiring to be around folks doing the communal-living thing, happy and thriving off the land...knowledgeable about plants and the earth and living sustainably. The local foods movement is exciting to me, and low-key food-making is something I hope to develop more in the future. My first loaf of bread ever sure smelled delicious on my drive back to Seattle this morning!


Days in Seattle with no rain yet: 11

Take that, Northwest-poo-pooers.