homesteading the hermitage

Friday night Mae, Aspen, Erik and I went to Thatch, the newish tiki bar in town. Erik and I stayed up late watching episodes from the first season of Arrested Development, loaned to us by Jocelyn.

Saturday morning Ted and I went for breakfast at Equinox, and on the way back we stopped at a running store so that he could get new shoes in time to break them in for the big Hood to Coast relay race this Friday. Erik and I went to the downtown farmers market and then to REI for an early birthday gift of fancy running socks for Ted. I must have puttered around the house and garden for a couple of hours, mostly prepping veggies in the kitchen. I forced myself to leave the house around 3pm to do shopping I've meant to and explore an area I've meant to for ages. It went fairly well, as I enjoyed the walking around bit. The main destination was fruitless, however, and despite trying on a couple of things at a slew of vintage stores, I was mostly left with the sad feeling of having moved on from the realm of such stores, when once they provided such delight. Luckily I stumbled into a tiny but exquisite jewelry store, where I purchased scissors and skull charms, and a laser-cut plexiglas octopus necklace. I also stopped by Biwa for an umeboshi onigiri on the way home. Erik and I met his parents for a beer at the Lucky Lab, and then I met a coworker and her husband and a friend for beer at a couple more places to guide them on Hawthorne, since they live in Hillsboro. I met up with them where they had dinner at the Hawthorne Fish House, and we went from there to Pix. They went on without me, despite protests, to the pub at the Baghdad.

Ted came over Sunday morning so that we could run down to the start of our long run. He's incredibly fast and the fancy socks only fueled his speed, so we did the entire seventeen miles averaging a nine-minute-mile pace. That's about a minute per mile faster than my usual. By the time we got home Erik had left to help a friend build a fence in his backyard, so I spent most of the day in the back garden weeding, trimming, finally getting the copper rain chain up, putting in bamboo edging, and generally puttering around the house. I put up a magnet strip in my sewing room for displaying bits of inspiration; it was meant for knives in the kitchen but was too long for the space I had wanted it to go. I also made hummus and babaganoush from scratch, and cleaned up my personal spaces around the house in preparation for my dad's visit and Hood to Coast-- my house will be the base for the team quite a few times over. When Erik got home we decided to try the much-touted new vegan restaurant, Nutshell. It was rather disastrous, but I got a book out of it. They had a book exchange area, and I took "Spook," Mary Roach's follow-up to "Stiff."

Overall I was mostly at home, mostly alone, and mostly getting things done, which is just about perfect.