Brunch at the French Bakery in Crossroads.
It’s filled with soft goat cheese and cooked spinach, and drizzled with fresh honey. Alongside is a mixed green salad, with balsamic dressing. In the background is a croissant filled with plum paste.
This place makes amazing food; if you ever happen to be in the area, stop in and check it out!
Filed under Project 365
The PDC stands for “The Poor Decisions Club”, and is the nickname of the last household of friends with which I’m staying on my Washington Trip.
Here’s some pictures I took around the house…
#206: Rainbow.
Seattle Pride is a major event with the PDC, and they had a big party to celebrate. And not all of the rainbow decorations were taken down a month later when I came over…
#207: More Kitties!
Meet Basil and his sister Hayden, the newest animal members of the PDC. If you happen to be familiar with a particular brand of whiskey, you’ll be laughing at those names…
#208: Burlesque Practice.
Two of the members of the PDC were practicing a burlesque routine. I gave them feedback and helped time it out to the music, and then took pictures of the aftermath…
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I was walking around Ballard after having breakfast with a friend from Hawaii who happened to be in Seattle overlapping my trip, when I came across this quote on the sign for a cafe. Even more appropriate, I had first met this friend because we were in the same book club!
Naturally, I had to make it my picture of the day.
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Taken on the bus while going to Shoreline from Northgate.
When I lived in Seattle, I did a lot of busing and walking — mostly because I didn’t have a car. This was the first time I needed to use the bus on my trip. Looking up routes and schedules, walking an extra ten or so blocks to avoid having to make a connection, waiting for the right bus to come to the stop, figuring out where I am on the route, unexpectedly recognizing a neighborhood from some other part of my past, realizing that the bus doesn’t quite go where I thought it did and figuring out how to improvise… It was like I never left.
However, I must say that it is SO MUCH EASIER to do it all with the GPS map on a smartphone, which I did not have until last Sunday. Thank you so much, Will! It’s a great birthday present, and I’m using it every day in ways my old phone just wasn’t capable of doing!
Filed under Project 365
Two weeks down, one week to go of living out of my suitcase… Thank goodness for other people’s washers and dryers!
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Capricious loves car rides.
She’s so long, she can fully sit down with her back end and still be tall enough to look this far out the window. She’ll stare avidly out, transfixed by the passing landscape. She’ll meow and bat at people who walk by if they don’t acknowledge her. She’ll sulk in the back window if there are too many sharp turns that make her slide around.
And she shed fur all over my suitcase. But that’s a small price to pay for such an entertaining cat…
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Self portrait: part masquerade, part cyborg!
Ceci and I have a history of something new happening with my hair when we are together. It started the very first time she came to visit me, back when we were teenagers. Basically, I ended up buzzing off my shoulder-length hair the night before my birthday, and haven’t looked back since.
More recently, she’s dyed my hair a verity of colors. While visiting her, I realized I hadn’t dyed my hair since moving to Hawaii. Naturally, this meant we had to fix that problem.
The result is actually quite subtle (by our standards). Thin streaks of metallic golden hair amidst my normal warm-toned dark brown; definitely something I’ll have fun with, even as it grows out.
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My next stop on the Seattle Trip was to stay with my friend Ceci.
She has two kitties:
Capricious, plotting her so-close-and-yet-so-far freedom…
And Inara, the wide-eyed spazzy huntress…
They’re both hybrids. Capricious is Savannah, from the African Serval; Inara is Bengal, from the Asian Leopard Cat.
One of the results of this is their gorgeous patterns on their coats:
Another is their deadly-sharp claws and teeth…
Regardless, as long as you are very careful or don’t mind bleeding a little, they are fun to play with!
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After filling up on the (mostly various kinds of toast) free breakfast at the SameSun Lodge hostel, Rachel and I checked out before heading onto the next adventure. We crossed the bridge and made our way here:
Granville Island Public Market. We drooled over the chocolate, fresh fruit, and pastries. We admired arts and crafts. We wandered the streets of Granville Island and poked through various shops and galleries. Then we headed back across the bridge.
After lunch at a Japanese Noodle house and another brief visit to Mink for more Iced Dark Chocolate with PepperMink (seriously, best drink ever!), we set out to Stanley Park.
At this point, we were both pretty tired. Yesterday afternoon and evening were spent walking around the city, and we had done it again all morning and early afternoon. So we knew we weren’t going to manage to see much of Stanley Park — which is a HUGE place anyway. But we had come all this way, and we were going to have fun!
We wandered over to the nearest beach to soak our feet in the cold water…
And then Rachel decided to kick the water (just because)…
We meandered along a path and saw Albert Einstein…
And basically just sat around in the shade a lot.
Then we continued on to Lyn Park, where they have a suspension bridge…
It was hard to take photos of the waterfall, due to all the people on the bridge making it shake, but this one turned out pretty good:
Then we hiked the paths a little, admiring how gorgeous the forest was…
And discovered someone had had a sense of humor when leaving graffiti on a dead tree…
(It says: “They’re taken the hobbits to Isengard.” And there’s some runes underneath on the right side.)
After that, we were both ready to be done with exploring for a while. We went straight back to the border, with a quick detour into the duty free shop, and on to Rachel’s apartment. It was about 9pm by the time we made it home; exhausted, giggling at everything, and already planning our next trip.
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I had planned to go up to Vancouver, B.C. with two of my cousins during my Seattle Trip. I’d never actually been up to Vancouver, and had been told many times how much I’d like it, so I was quite excited for our overnight adventure.
However, one of the cousins forgot her passport and had to bail on the trip. She was teased about this mercilessly, of course.
So Rachel and I set off, neither of us having ever been there before. (Megan, who forgot her passport (REALLY, MEGAN? REALLY?) was the only one who had been to Vancouver previously, and had planned the trip for us.)
Our first stop was the bank to exchange USD for Canadian money. And I got my first-ever first-hand experience with the new plastic money:
It was pretty awesome.
Then we headed across the border. First stop in Vancouver was the hostel, SameSun Lodge, to check in and drop off our stuff. We’re reserved beds in a four-bed woman’s dorm with a shared bathroom, only $37 Canadian for a night, and right in the middle of the area we wanted to explore.
It was pretty nice, actually. Very clean, and with a small fan above each bed as well as a larger one for the room. They also proved a free breakfast and free internet.
This was our view from the room:
We immediately set out to wander the streets and explore. After several hours of wandering, we finally made it near the waterfront and Canada Place.
We did the touristy thing and took pictures…
And spend a long time admiring this really awesome fountain/waterfall…
And I did a mini-photo-shoot with my super-yummy iced dark chocolate with peppermint drink…
(Seriously, if you’re ever in the area, stop by Mink Chocolate Cafe and get this. It’s so yummy and refreshing and total awesomeness: Iced Dark Chocolate with PepperMink.)
We wandered back, and rested our sore feet while looking for dinner options…
Dinner was had after more wandering, and after another rest we went out for drinks and dancing. But since it was a weekday, there wasn’t much going on (apart from the street that had been blocked off for filming a movie), so we made it an ‘early’ night and went to sleep about two am so we could get up in time for the breakfast and more exploring.
I didn’t bring my camera at that point, because my batteries were low and I’d forgotten to bring the spares, so no pictures. But there are more pictures to come from our second day! To be continued…
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In Which I Experiment with Blogging. 