Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving comes with two things this year. 1st: Extra work!! yay! I got to work both the day before thanksgiving and today the day after. That makes for one happy occasion. Wednesday was actually a little bit crazy in the restaurant. And here I was thinking that people would be fasting for the big feast. Also, I got a bit lucky today and got snuck some extra time in at work. Cha-Ching!

2nd: New people. This year I spent thanksgiving with nine people I have never spent thanksgiving with before. One of them my friend from work, another being my roommate & boyfriend, and the rest strangers! It was a pretty good time and Jonathan, from work, took a few pictures that you all can check out since I'm putting them on the blog!

Jon's a good photographer with sneak attach shots of me checking the recipe

Pot pie pre-bake.

Late! Wah Wah!

Today I was late for work!

Bleh!

I live 2 blocks away and I was late!

I am not a total slacker. Neither of my alarms went off this morning!! I don't even know why because both were clearly set.

I got a write up.

I am never late to work.

If anyone had called me when I was 3 minutes late then I would have been only 7 minutes late. That's how close to work I live, and how important it is to me to be on time to work!

Then, when it got slow early, I got sent home first because I was late to work. How am I going to pay my bills when I am only getting 3 hours of work in a day?!

Ah!! Bad morning.

Looking for a new place

Right now, as I type, I'm living in a wonderful location with fairly nice roommates and a hot cup of tea next to me. So, why, you might ask, is the title of this blog "Looking for a new place? Well, the reason is this, I don't like how anti social my roommates are. The ones that live downstairs are actually really nice and they talk to me when they're upstairs BUT the ones that live upstairs (one in particular) frequently go on loud rants about how humanity sucks or some other topic that I generally just don't want to hear ranted about.

I can't handle it. I don't want to be caught in my room at least once a week afraid to go out into the land of ranting. I want to live somewhere where if I have 6 people over they're not getting the stink eye from my incredibly anti social roommates. I would prefer to live farther away from work, in a stinkier part of town, than have to feel bad about occupying the communal spaces in my house. Also, I'd like to find cheaper rent.

It's a strange dichotomy because on one hand, I generally like all of my roommates and would enjoy spending time with them but on the other hand, there is such a pervasive air of unwillingness to socialize that I feel uncomfortable spending any time with them. I know, it doesn't make sense and that's why I want to move, because of something that doesn't make sense.

Anyways, I have just started to house hunting process and will probably live here for a few more months, at least.

Wish me luck on the adventure of finding a good place to live!

Postal

I just wanted to write a quick shout out to all of those who have written me mail and most recently I've received a few solid post card contributions to add to my mail collection.

Shout out Dogfish Head post cards and South Carolina post cards!

If you're thinking about adding to my mail collection you can send me mail at

808 Southeast 43rd Ave.

Portland, OR 97215

Tea bags

I recently got sick and am now feeling much better. I still have a few of the pesky remnants of a cold but, in general, I am all better or so I hope.

Since moving to Portland, I have been especially into drinking teas. I've always enjoyed a good cup of tea but now I find myself buying tea whenever I find it on sale and offering tea to my friends as a reason they should come over.

When I got sick, my tea intake, which had been at about 1 cup with a fresh tea bag went up to at least 2 cups a day sometimes more. And I have no way of counting my tea bag reuse but I know for a fact that today I've reused at least 2 tea bags once. I'm just trying to give you a picture of what kind of tea drinking has been going on here.

Why am I explaining this to you? I don't know. But something else I don't know is why, at the end of my birthday I started collecting my old tea bags? So far I have 20. some of them are almost dry while others are still soft and fresh from the cup. I hope that none of them mold.

Here's a picture or two of my newest collection.

My collection

Close up.

Still Ill

What?! WHAt?! I've been sick for the past few days and have no interesting things to update you all on. Sorry :((

I'm taking a new cold medicine that seems to be relieving my body of many of it's more painful symptoms so that's a relief. I got an extra few hours of work yesterday but getting to work seemed to throw my body back off and the rest of the day I just slept, drank tea, and ate soup. Bleh, story of my week.

Helpful note: if you haven't tried split pea soup you probably won't like it. I didn't anyways.

I'm trying to get out of the house more today as my energy level is at a new high for the week. Yay!!

Birthday Dinner

A few days ago was my official, 25 hour long, birthday. That's right, daylight savings time happened on my birthday this year thus increasing the time I got to spend celebrating my birthday. I did sleep through at least 9 hours of my birthday because I was fighting off something awful (unsuccessfully it turns out). But the rest of my 25 hour day I celebrated every minute!

At work they sang me slappy birthday-because I work at Slappy Cakes- and whipped creamed me in the face with delicious homemade whipped cream. However, my real birthday celebration took the place of a delicious meal that I had for dinner. I invited two friends I've made at work, my two couch surfing hosts, and my one fellow new Portlander that I met while at the Hostel and had most of them make something wonderful for my dinner.

Here's how it turned out:

Dana, my couch surfing host: made a delicious salad, two kinds of leafy things, carrots, tomatoes, crazins, feta cheese, and yellow peppers.

Rosie, her roommate: grated the carrots for the salad

Cory, my fellow hosteler: made a delicious steamed yellow squash dish that incorporated lemon juice, butter and Parmesan cheese as well as squash.

Jack, a friend from work: roasted some simple, yet delicious, carrots with the basic ingredients of salt, pepper and olive oil.

Jonathan, another friend from work: made the main course of fettuccine alfredo spicing it up with a bit of nutmeg.

And I made a somewhat sloppy but still sweet and tasty Chocolate Chess Pie for dessert.

All in all, it was a successful meal and as a delightful bonus Dana and Rosie made me the cutest card and brought me delicious french truffles!

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