I automatically fill that in any time anyone starts a sentence with “when I woke up this morning…”

Anyway, when I woke up this morning I was tired and didn’t wash my hair. It’s a little helmet-y today. Amazing how it can be both frizzy and greasy at the same time. Lovely!

Here are some better looking days:

The weather has been WONDERFUL here so a few weeks ago we took a trip to the zoo. It was pretty cool. Red pandas are cute. Hippos are scary. Parents of small children are scarier than the children themselves. I got unreasonably irritated at a woman in the reptile/amphibian house because she kept telling her daughter the snakes were slimy and those tiny frogs were just cute little babies. False! Read the informative plaques! I was, however, completely won over by a bespectacled 10 year old boy educating his dad on the difference between coral and king snakes.

Seattle does a nice job with the flowers. Poppies are so floppy. It rained the day after I took this and these basically disintegrated.

My birthday was this week. I’m 29. 29 is fine so far. My friends and coworkers wished me happy birthday. Chris took me out to dinner.

Happy Friday!

I’m ready.

Too bad they are $600. I’d have to wear them everywhere to get enough use out of them. Sitting in my cube, flopped on the floor in hot yoga, picking out overpriced vegetables at PCC, perched on various bar stools in the neighborhood. I think that sounds justifiable.

This past weekend was pretty uneventful, but pretty fun. Lots of movie watching.

Friday night we made vegetable pasta. It was pretty good, a little boring but very vegetable-y. I like food like that, a little bland.

The weather was nice and sunny all week last week and got cold and cloudy on the weekend. Oh well. Seattle behaving as expected.

Saturday afternoon we went to see Oblivion at Cinerama. It was fun! The movie was kind of dumb, but it looked really cool and sometimes that’s all you really want. I love Saturday afternoon movie days. Especially because we usually get a doughnut before the show.

After the movie we did a little shopping. Here’s the dude couch at Anthropologie:

Then we headed home for an early dinner at the new restaurant in the neighborhood, the Sixgill. The food was really good and I had a cider that was very nice also. Then we went home and watched Iron Man. But I fell asleep.

Sunday I made mini fritattas with the leftover vegetables from Friday’s dinner. They were good! But I’d use goat cheese rather than pepper jack next time. Pepper jack was just what I had on hand.

The rest of Sunday was pretty lazy, ending with beers and nachos.

I’ve had really long hair for a really long time, and have been wanting to chop it off for the past few months. My hair is wavy and thick, and when it is so long I hardly ever do anything with it, opting instead to pile it on top of my head in a bun that I hear is unattractive. What’s the point of having so much hair if it’s just pulled back all the time?

I like getting my hair cut, though I sometimes suffer from lying to my hairdresser about how likely I am to do my hair, and how much I know about styling my own hair.  In reality, I know very little. Straightening is hard. My hair almost never looks the way it does after a cut (see pic above).

That’s what my hair looks like before the chop. Pretty! But unrealistic.

It usually really looked more like this:

Minus the feathered headdress.

Self styled.

More self styled.

And self styled again. So the self styling is not nearly as professional as the after cut picture…oh well. The whole point of chopping my hair off is so I could realistically do it and not knot it on top of my head like a librarian stereotype.

Anyway, I ordered a fancier flat iron.

It was amazing, so beautiful, so relaxing.

We decided to take this trip almost on a whim – we’d been discussing vacations, throwing ideas around. California? Michigan? (kidding, but not really). Then I found some really affordable flights to Maui and the planning got more serious. After some trepidation, we just went for it!

We stayed at the Maui Kaanapali Villas.  I really liked our hotel – it had a nice big pool, the hotel room had a kitchen, and there were wonderful chairs for overlooking the ocean. Our flight to Maui  arrived in the evening, so the drive up to the hotel was in the dark. We pulled up to the front of the hotel surrounded by tiki torches and hopped out of the rental car in 75 degree weather – it was a pretty exciting moment – “I’m in Hawaii!”

Since we arrived in the dark, the first morning was spent exploring the beach. Hawaii is 3 hours behind Seattle, so I woke up around 5 every day, which was perfect – up early to enjoy the peaceful morning.

Early morning on the beach.

I spent a lot of time on the beach, swimming, some snorkeling, just walking up and down and checking out the other hotels. We tried stand up paddle boarding, and that was really fun. I saw a bunch of turtles and lots of neat fish.

Beach during the day.

We watched the sunrise from the top of the volcano one morning. We got up at 3 am to make it up there in time!

It was worth the early morning.

I drank some Mai Tais at the hotel.

And I ate some pineapple pancakes.

No pineapple hot dog though, though I regret passing by a sign for those.

Spent a fair amount of time reading here.

Went for a drive.

Almost got eaten by a ray. The Maui Ocean Center was a really great aquarium!

Sunset from the shuffleboard court.

The pool at night.

Beautiful sunset from the beach at the hotel.

We stayed for a whole week, and it was perfect. It was a good amount of active and relaxing – plenty of swimming and sightseeing, but also lots of staring out at the water. Because the hotel room had a really nice kitchen, we wound up cooking in a lot of the time, which not only saved money but was fun. Pretty perfect to be able eat your burritos on your lanai.

I will definitely go back!

The main reason I need to do a little work this weekend is I’m taking 6 days off, starting on Tuesday, for my trip to Hawaii! So I really should not complain.

The weather has been dreary, which is fine, since I needed to stay in and clean and snuggle the cat.

Rain, rain.

Started out Friday evening with margaritas for dinner. Fun, if headache inducing.

Then I spotted a narwhal and insisted on taking lots of pictures of it. I was excited. And I’d had 3 margaritas.

And most of the rest of the weekend has been spent hanging around the house.

No complaints from me or from this cat faced cat.

Sorry it has been so long since my last post – I keep meaning to make this a regular thing, but then I suppose I don’t have much to say. I mean, I probably do, but putting pen to paper(?) is hard to do.

Last weekend I went to the arboretum. The weather was really beautiful.

Then I went out for Mai Tai. I’m headed to Hawaii next week! I’m so excited. Last weekend was really beautiful in Seattle, but we are back to grey today.

And just in case you forgot how cute this thing is, here’s the cat faced one:

Ok, I better get back to work. Must answer all the emails before vacation time!

I haven’t. I don’t have a gym membership. I was going to go running after work today but I woke up at 3 in the morning and I AM TIRED. So I think I will go home and eat kale and scrambled eggs and talk to my cat.

I had a good New Year’s Eve. I wore a mini dress and a feathered headpiece and barely made it to midnight. New Year’s Day I drank all the leftover champagne.

I’m at work today, at a VERY quiet office with very few tasks at hand and not much desire to focus on them. It is freezing in here and I look a little bit like an art teacher in black skinny jeans that are somehow baggy, striped socks, clogs, and a plaid flannel shirt I have maybe worn 3 days in a row. Whatever. There’s no one here to see me. Oh I also have a huge black sweater coat wrapped around me. It’s freezing.

Soon it will be time for New Year’s Eve festivities and I’ll have to get all dolled up. I don’t have any closed toe high heels. Is it ok to wear tights with open toe shoes? I know the answer to this question.

I don’t really have any NYE festivities planned, I’m kind of lying. I think we’re going to dress up and have a drink out and then go home and make confetti and throw it at each other. We thought about going to a fancy dinner, but didn’t make any plans until, like, 2 hours ago, so surprise! things are all booked. Or have ridiculously high prices. It’s hard to pay $150 for a restaurant you frequent weekly and I don’t like truffle oil anyway.

2012 was a nice middle of the road year, no great highs, no deep lows. I decided I liked Seattle. I started dating someone nice and fun and funny. I kept in touch with faraway friends. My family visited me and I visited them. I was a bridesmaid in my dear friend’s wedding. I went camping and saw some beautiful sights. I ate and drank a lot. I freaked out about work more than is probably warranted.

Well, I’m off to cut up newspapers into confetti. Have a fun, safe and happy New Year’s Eve!

I didn’t have enough days off, plane ticket prices were out of control. It just made more sense to stay in Seattle, and save my family time for January, when I will be able to stay in Michigan for 2+ weeks and work from home.

Sensible or not, this is the first time I haven’t spent Christmas in the UP, with my family. The run up to Christmas was a little difficult – I kept reassuring my parents and my self that this was the best option, that the holiday would be ok for all of us, if just a little different. I fretted about presents and shipping, worried that they would be sad, that I was ruining Christmas for my family.

But then the holiday weekend came, and I didn’t get on a plane. We talked on the phone, I insured their packages would get there on December 24. We realized it was ok to do things differently. I realized this is part of growing up, of choosing to live across the country.

And I had a happy Christmas.

I had fun opening presents from home.

Maybe too much fun.

I spent the holidays with Chris. We watched a lot of movies. We made delicious food and bloody marys. I accidentally made 3 pans of cinnamon rolls.

I miss my family and they miss me. But I had a nice holiday all the same.