Good deed for the day

For a second I swore I was gonna get robbed today.

Help?

I was on my way into work, like any other day.  I was fighting with the metro and red line single tracking, like any other day.  I got to my stop early, and was thinking of what to do to kill 20 minutes.

Generally when I'm early, I start looking around for the nearest coffee shop and think longingly of lemonade on a hot day.  I'm trying to stick to a budget, so today I ignored my daydreams of sweet and refreshing drinks and headed for the Starbucks.

Ummmm Caitie.......that makes less than no sense..........

Seems a little counter-intuitive, no?  Going to a coffee shop that I frequently complain about because of its ridiculous pricing, and I'm trying to stick to a budget.  Yeah, I know.  But the nice thing about Starbucks?  I can order a cup of ice water.  No money, no hassle, just a cup of water.  And having to walk past work and stand in line for it would definitely kill time.  So I headed off.

I was literally passing the front door of my building when a guy stopped me.  Surprised me, really, since I had my headphones in and was kinda focused on getting to the Starbucks without melting from the heat.  The guy tried to force a small bouquet of flowers into my hand, but kept eyeing my purse.  He then followed it up by asking for change because he was homeless, but his eyes kept straying back to my purse which, on a work day, looks overly stuffed from the jackets and cardigans and my lunch being packed into it (work is cold and I gotta eat).

Yeah.  Not so charming in real life

So what to do.  This made me incredibly nervous.  By the time you reach my building, the number of people thin out a bit.  This guy was easily 20-30 years older than me and probably stronger - I am a wimp, I admit it.  He was close enough he could make a grab for my bag.  

Help help help what do I do?????

However, the guy literally picked flowers out of the flowerbeds in front of my building to offset the fact that he was asking for spare change.  This gave me an idea.

My dad used to tell stories of my uncle.  My uncle is a man who likes to laugh and cook good food and joke around.  He is the comic relief of the family and makes everyone smile.  My cousins even called him "Uncle Wacko" when we were little because we thought he was so silly and just a little bit crazy.  And one of the stories my dad would tell of his little brother was that my uncle wouldn't give money to the homeless when he could get them a coffee or something to eat instead.

The homeless man with the ragged bouquet of flowers was quite taken aback when I said no, I don't have any spare change on me, but how about I buy you lunch?  I don't think anyone's ever done that to him.  So I steered us back to the nearby Au Bon Pain (and a group of more people, to make me feel safer) and took him inside.  

By now, this guy had stopped staring at my bulging purse and became quite shy.  He kept mumbling that no thanks, he didn't want anything to eat, no thanks, but maybe something to drink?  I gestured to the rows of coffee pots in various flavors, to the tea, to the soda and told him to take his pick.  He shuffled over and grabbed a sprite.  The moment I paid for it, he was out the door with another shy thanks.  By the time I got my change and left, he was gone.

Good deed for the day and crisis averted.  Now back to work.

End of Summer Update

If you've been reading along, there isn't much to update.  Life's pretty much the same and settling into a routine.


If you HAVEN'T been reading, first and foremost, shame on you.  I have fun writing these, you should be reading for the silly stories and misadventures of my life.  But anyway, let's recap.

• I graduated from college

• I wrote a lot of cover letters

• I got a job

• My cousin visited

• I found a new apartment

• I moved into said new apartment

• I have been working

Aaaaaaaaand that's it.  More misadventures to follow, whenever life wakes up a little.

Yarn, Yarn Everywhere

It's no secret.  I am a crocheter.  Many thanks to my mother and my best friends Noelle and Bre for getting me into it.

For those who live under a crafting rock, crochet is a way to make things out of yarn that DOESN'T involve knitting needles.  No needles at all.  People who know me will understand - I hate hate HATE needles (mostly medical, but really just any needles).

See?  A hook, not a pair of needles

Blankets, hats, stuffed animals.  You get the picture.  I craft.


This means I get to spend copious amounts of time at the craft store drooling over pretty yarn while my wallet hurts.

It costs so much, but it's a fabulous way to de-stress.  And frankly, after the stress of college and trying to land a job and being an adult, I need it.  Life reduces to one stitch at a time and I can keep my emotions in check until life evens back out.


The idea came to me last fall.  Classes were hard, my living situation was tanking, and my emotional stability was fraying.  So I picked a pattern and bought four balls of yarn when I went home for the weekend.  I figured it would be a good way to distract myself.  Every time I felt upset or homesick or worried, I would sit down and pull out my yarn and continue working.  Within a month, I had a plushie Pokemon.  And I realized that I felt better.  I channeled all the crap from my life into making something cute, something I could hold and hug and throw at my roommate when she edges me off the road in Mario Kart.


Thus, my crafting was born.  I have crocheted two pokemon - one Torchic and one Cyndaquil....

....as well as a purple elephant, an owl, an ember, and a blanket.  And, as soon as I get more yarn, I will have another blanket.  So much crafting....

It's Decorating Time!

That's right!  I, Caitie, have moved to a new apartment!  Honestly, the old one pretty much turned into a trainwreck and I couldn't get outta there fast enough.  That being said, yay new place!  This means..................IT'S TIME TO GO SHOPPING!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Surprisingly enough, I like to decorate.  I have a complete blank slate of a room and it is completely mine do to with as I please.  So the first question is this.


What color?

This is important.  Like any new apartment, the walls are somewhere between white and light beige with a white trim.  The carpet is beige.  The ceiling is white and kinda popcorn-y.  Thus, there is a great need to deck the room out in colors.


But which to choose?  My favorite color is purple, but most of the purple bed sets/lamps/etc are not that lovely deep purple but a shade of wimpy lavender.  Lavender is a lovely scent, not so much as a shade.  And that deep, vibrant purple?  What little is that color is more than ridiculously expensive.

Why must you hurt me so

Popular colors shoved on women and girls are soft, light, airy.  Boring.  Even worse, it seems to be a universal expectation that women have a deep and abiding love of the color pink.

Ick. Get it away from me!

I hate pink.  There was a brief moment when I was little when I thought it was ok, but I'm pretty sure that moment shriveled up within the hour.  Ever since, I have a special hatred in my heart for that particular color.  Which makes life hard, as WHY DOES EVERYTHING NEED TO BE PINK??????


So no pink.  Baby blue is out because just no.  Spring green is nice, but I'd rather not have it all over my room.  Darker, deeper colors speak to me.  Forest greens, deep purples, scarlet reds, etc.  Colors that are not pastel speak to me, such as teals.


So what did I choose?  This beauty right here.

Classy as hell

Navy and white paisley reverses to white with a navy border.  It doesn't completely clash with my zebra print pillow, nor with my giant green pillows or purple backrest thing.  And even better, I essentially have the "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" metal frame.

Close enough, but you get the picture

Now my room is sneakily classy.  All I need are some nice baskets to throw my ski hats and various yarn things in and I'll be all set.


Shipped with the classy bedding was a pair of navy curtains.  I hate blinds, and they never block out enough light in my opinion, so I've decided to ignore them and mount some curtains instead.  I just need a metal curtain rod and to find some golden hooks (to match the


To continue the classy real-person room, I add a print of a painting I literally got for $3.

Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night

The thing is like 4 feet high and it cost $3.  Combined with a Monet print, plus shipping, I got the lot for $15.  I'm quite proud of this.  Classy as hell room, didn't break the bank.

Add the wooden bureau I've had forever, a print of Sacre Coeur I got abroad, my matryoshka, lean my guitar against the wall, and voila!  My awesome, real world, working adult bedroom.

Daytime singletracking

Whoever thought it was a good idea to do track work on the Red Line today needs to be disabused of this notion.  Preferably with a heavy club.  Repeatedly.

This is a map of the DC metro.  It normally takes me about 20 to go from the platform at Silver Spring to my desk in Metro Center.


Today, I left a little early and hopped the metro 15 minutes earlier than usual.  The train stopped at Takoma station for 5 minutes.  The train stopped at Ft Totten for 8 minutes.  And the train stopped at Brookland-CUA for 16 minutes.  This doesn't include the time it takes for the train to actually drive to each station.  So I sat on a train for almost an hour until it finally pulled into my station.  I was 15 minutes late to work, and only because I flew off that platform and raced up the escalators so as not to be any later.


Every person on that train had similar looks on their faces.

So thank you, DC metro.  As always, it has not been a pleasure riding.

It's time to move it, move it

Damn, but I hate moving.


It was bad enough when I had to move back and forth from college.  My whole life had to fit in the back of a van, and worse, it had to fit behind my brother's seat because EVERYONE needed to come help me move in every time without fail.  It was enough stuff that you needed x-ray vision to see out the back window.

What was worse was that every time I went off to college, I came back with even more stuff.  Somehow as the year progressed, I ended up with more and more little things.  Which meant more boxes and bags and cramming things into the van.  Quite a few of the crap I hauled back with me was textbook and old homework based, which didn't help.

Overflowing in tests and papers that, let's be honest, no one wants to see again

In short, I embraced the old family tradition of not being able to throw things away.  So I'd get home and have to wade through drifts of college paraphernalia to sort out what I needed and what I really should chuck.  It probably would've been easier if I just did that before I left school, but hey!  Procrastination makes perfect, right?

Yeah, I should know better by now

So now I moved to a new apartment.  Actually moved this time, not the half-moving I've been doing for the last two weeks.  I have an actual bed, an actual bureau, and all of my stuff in one place again.  It is wonderful.  I'm no longer running around my apartment looking for things that I already packed up and shifted.


So on Saturday the Great Move began with a text at 8am saying my new bed will be delivered around noon and my dad would be arriving at 11am.

Come talk to me at a more reasonable hour.  Like, after 10am

I hauled myself outta bed and caught a cab over to my new apartment with yet another suitcase full of stuff.  I got in, emptied every box/bag/suitcase I had brought with me in the last two weeks, and repacked them together to go back to the old apartment.  My dad arrived with the bureau I've had since I was little and a bookcase from home.  Into the apartment we carried them.  The items I knew exactly where they'd go went directly into my room - everything else was dumped into the living room area.  Once the bed came, we hopped in the van and drove back to the old apartment.


It was chaos.  Absolute chaos.

There were half filled boxes everywhere, the dining room table was buried, large furniture was crowding the hallway, and there was a dad taking apart a loft in the bedroom on his own.


Complicating this was what I will call the Subletter debacle.  Basically, a subletter was subletting Roommate A's spot via Roommate B, but no one bothered to communicate with each other.  Thus the day of the move, the roommates were annoyed and flustered, and the subletter decided to go on an all day adventure instead of getting her stuff transferred to her new place.  All around, just problems.

We worked all day.  My dad, my new roommate, and I made three trips back and forth from my new place to my old place, which ended up looking like someone's storage cube even as the old place emptied out.

I have far too much stuff......

Beds, dressers, desks, lamps, food, everything was forcibly removed, fought over, and inevitably moved elsewhere.  The old apartment slowly started to show carpeting again, though by this point that thing was dingy and stained and will probably be ripped up, much to the unhappiness of our wallets.  Some part of me is still hopeful I'll get some of my deposit back.  The rest of me is resigned to the fact that pigs will fly before the complex'll let go of my deposit.


So the old apartment began to turn back into empty walls and empty halls.  All that was left were boxes and tired people.  Which meant it was a perfect time for a surprise!


You see, it was my dad's birthday last week.  I miss not being home for family birthdays - my family lets the birthday person choose what to have for dinner that night, and usually I'm the one that makes their cake.  Kinda hard to do that while I'm in Washington and they're in New England.  So I stayed up until 3am last Friday to prep a cake for my dad.  I even had a mild panic attack because we only had one cake tin and so much Pam, and the first batch stuck.  I even mixed the batter in a wok because I didn't have my mixing bowls at the old place anymore.

How's that for lack of baking utensils

While my dad ran out to the car with another bag, I got everyone else to stall him.  I fished the cake outta the back of the fridge, cleared off the still-not-moved coffee table, and tried to light it.  Sadly, lighting cakes with little lighters is a bad idea, and I burnt my thumb wicked bad on the superheated metal.  But hey, removing a fingerprint was worth the look of surprise on my dad's face when he came back in and saw I made a whole cake for him.  He had no clue.


After that, things wound down fast.  Everything got packed away.  We vacuumed the whole place in the dark.  The keys got handed in.  And that was that.  Good riddance.

Adventure time - Cousins Edition

Oops.  I forgot to post this at the time, so here it is now!  Better late than never, right?

Yes.  Well.


It all started in late May when I got a message from my cousin Sophie, who lives overseas.  Essentially it said SURPRISE I'M COMING TO VISIT to which the appropriate reaction is

YESSSSSSSSSSSSS

I see my cousins so rarely that the chance to spend any time with them causes me to flip out in joy.  Such was the case here.  Sophie was set to come in on the 1st of July and stay through 4th of July weekend here in DC.  The only problem was that I had just landed a job, but we figured we'd work around that.  Our family has experience working on very little plans and scheduling that playing it by ear comes naturally, if a bit stressfully.


I should not be this excited after 4 years living in DC, but I really like being a tourist.  I think it's wicked fun - you get to wander around and look at whatever you feel like seeing and take a shit ton of pictures you might glance through later.  Also the perfect time to play DC TOURIST BINGO!!!!!


Anyway.  The week before Sophie was set to arrive, I got another message.  Turns out a friend of hers offered to give her a ride down instead of heading back north to catch a flight to DC, so she'd be arriving a few days earlier.

And so our week of adventuring in our nation's capitol began.

In which the actual adventuring kinda resembled this:

First up is obvious.  The monuments at night.  That is ALWAYS the first step, as everyone gets in during the day and then what do you do with your evening?  Sit around and have a leisurely catch-up?  HELL NO!  You can do that on the metro as you head down to the Mall.  So we start with the monuments.


During the week, I went off to work as usual.  Sophie would metro down with me and head out to the museum of the day.  After work, we would meet up for food and exploring and to see what she'd sketched that day.


On that Friday, I had the day off of work (Fourth of July observed, thank you!).  To celebrate, we went to the Spy Museum.  I'm not a museum person, but I love this place.  There are things to look at, reproductions of actual things used to spy on people (or kill them), and I'm pretty sure the temporary James Bond exhibit has become permanent.  We even went crawling up in the ducts they have for small children to see if we could make it across without tripping the sound levels.

Now of course, this was Fourth of July weekend, which means there was copious amounts of flags and freedom everywhere.

Gratuitous amounts.  Overwhelming amounts

For the Fourth, we met up with my friend Claire and trooped down to Pennsylvania Ave for the parade.  And by trooped, I mean wilted.  It was cool up by my apartment, but by the time we got outta the metro at Metro Center, Sophie and I were melting into a little puddle of sadness and broken dreams.  Claire, curse her, was perfectly fine.  We watched maybe half the parade with its floats and marching bands before we decided that the heat was far too much and retreated to a nearby coffee shop for something cold to drink.

We split ways after that and went back to my apartment to take a nap.  When it started getting to be dinnertime, we scooped up my roommate and metro'd off to the Library of Congress to meet up with Claire.  That was my brilliant idea.  The fireworks would be shot off from the Mall, but I figured there'd be less people at the Library of Congress and we'd still have a decent view.  Plus we'd actually have a seat on the red line coming back.


So the four of us met back up, and had a picnic on the steps of the Library of Congress.  There were cheese and crackers, pepperoni and sausage, carrots and hummus, coke and chocolate chip cookies.  More friends joined up with us as the evening went on.  It was a fun gathering of random people in my life.  And, of course, we could see the fireworks by the Washington Monument, over the side of the Capitol building.  It was perfect.

Life Moves On

This is one of those moments where life kinda crashes over my head.  Not in the sense that my day has gone to shit and I feel the need to hide under vast quantities of blankets and eat ice cream straight from the tub.  Not today at least.


Do you ever wonder how you got to this moment, this place in your life?  Ever look back and think about how life was, how it is now, and reflect on how things have changed?


This past week, I moved to a new apartment.  True, I'm not fully moved outta the old one, but I now have a way to live at the new place.  Blank walls in my own room - my own clean slate.  It hits home that I'm now in the working world and I have to be an adult.  There are no more months-long vacations, no homework due every day, no textbooks to haggle over.  I wear nice clothes now, pick my earrings as carefully as my shoes, and have a set routine for the week.


One of my best friends just said yet another round of goodbyes as he headed off into the unknown for the job of a lifetime.  Another is tying up loose ends in preparation for yet another trip overseas - she'll be gone for a year.  And a third is gearing up for an international internship that'll take her across the pond.  Three best friends who I now rarely get to see, heading off into the blue for mad adventures.  I miss them so much it hurts.


There are times when I'm glad I'm growing up and beginning to carve out my own little niche in the world.  And then there are times when I wish I could go back to when we all were a little less stressed, a little happier, and a little more carefree.  Sometime before we had to worry about bills and loans and when we'll find the time to pick up the groceries.


Alas.  Life moves on.

Is it Dinnertime Yet?

........a variation on the ever-popular Caitie statement "Is it naptime yet?"


Basically, I'm hungry.

*stomach growls*

During the week, I wake up and eat breakfast somewhere between 10:30am and 11am.  Because I'm boring and still half asleep, it's usually cereal

After breakfast, it's out the door and off to work.  Where I work for a solid five hours before lunch/dinner rolls around.  That's right.  I am STARVING by the time I get my dinner break.  Which means a measly sandwich will not cut it.  No, not even TWO sandwiches would cut it.  So I'm left with a dilemma.  I need a dinner food for work, but since there's only a microwave, I need something that reheats well.  Oh, and it has to fit into my bag to make it to work.


Talk about a pain in the neck.


I don't know about you, but when I get home from work, all I wanna do is sit down and have some food (in my case, usually it's a sandwich at 9:30pm).  Maybe watch some TV.  But most importantly, to relax.

Free at last

However, since I need to have dinner prepared in advance for work, a chunk of my relax-after-work time is eaten up by me making something that can be nuked later.  And/or that can be made in bulk now.


This means I inevitably default with pasta.  Most pastas are easily heated back up and taste pretty much the same.  Or maybe I'll make stir fry, or fried rice.  Both can be made in large quantities and last me several days.  Or, if I'm in a good cooking mood, jambalaya is pretty quick to throw together and lasts me longer since the spices keep me from eating a lot (I'm really REALLY bad with spicy anything).  But that's not too many things to make.


So tell me, for those of you who actually read my blog (if you actually exist, that is).  What should I make for my lunch-dinners?  Suggestions are much appreciated.