13

G'day all!

It is near the end of June, and you know what that means?

It's anniversary time!

Sunday was the sixth anniversary of us moving to the States.  We have now spent four of the last six years in the US.  Time flies when you're having fun!  It also seems to fly when you aren't having fun, it just feels like it is crawling.

Today is the 13th anniversary of DH and I hooking up.  He was such a shy thing, believe it or not.  I was the one pushing the relationship but he seemed fairly happy about the whole idea, if a bit terrified.

I think I deserve a medal.  Maybe he deserves a medal too - I apparently scared off all the other chaps.  Scariness runs in my family it seems.

I am extra chuffed by something I did on Saturday.  Alas, there don't seem to be any photos of me online, and I am not sharing my photos with you because they show somewhat more detail than I am comfortable sharing on an open forum.

Also, I don't want to scare my dear readers off.

Solstice Parade!  Hooray!

Every year, at the start of the Solstice Parade in Fremont, the Naked Bike Riders ride around and around the parade route.  They aren't so much naked, usually, as painted.  Being completely naked is not encouraged as it is harder to say that your intent is not to arouse (nekkidness isn't the issue so much as being naked with the intent of arousing).  Being body painted is preferred.

I didn't get touched by His Noodly Appendage
this year...

I should say we, not they.

Last year I promised myself that I would do the naked bike ride this year.  DH did too but he chickened out.  I knew I would be terribly disappointed in myself and would regret not doing it soooo.....

I girded my loins, grabbed my bike and headed off to the paint party on Saturday morning.  It was quite odd stripping off to my knickers in the middle of a heap of nekkid men and women.  I wasn't going further than that - braless was enough, what with me and my lumpectomy scar.  Wandering round effectively topless yet feeling oddly clothed, I helped others with their paint jobs too.

I was charming in a pink body suit with blue and purple highlights.  And purple painted knickers, which went oddly stiff.  Ahem!  And the only pics of me are posed ones, unless you count the two shots in which I am a out of focus blob on a bike in the wide angle pics.  But I'll let you see this bit.

20130622_pinkthigh
Pink thigh post parade plus skirt
You didn't think I wandered around nekkid
all arvo?

It was quite odd how dressed I felt even though I wasn't really.  It was the impression of being clothed I guess.  It was also pretty warm because you can't sweat through the paint (I had acrylic fabric paint on - the paint has to be non-toxic for reasons that you can guess!).  Plus it was a glorious, glorious day on Saturday.

Blurry bike riders in pretty coloured "outfits"

All in all, it was one of the best things I've ever done, and I'll butter up for next year, if I'm still here and able to do it.

What other exciting things have happened?

Leavenworth
We went for a drive, supposedly to Stevens Pass but it turned out that every last VW Golf in Washington state was there as well, along with a few other v-dubs and other European cars, so we ended up in Leavenworth again instead.  It was entertaining.  I wanted to look at Lake Wenatchee on the way home after DH insisted we try a different route through the mountains.  I spent an HOUR trying to access the lake, driving up and down and up and down and discovering the "through" road is closed after a bridge was taken out about two years ago - google maps told us we could get through.  I should've turned left not right at an intersection but I trusted the map, and it was wrong!

Lake Wenatchee


DH is alternately whining about work then bouncing about it.  It seems that something he has been struggling with for months is finally starting to work, just as well too because I've been ready to throttle him.  (Hence me needing a medal.)

Wenatchee River
We passed summer Solstice.  Of course I didn't see the sun rise or set on Solstice - the clouds saw to that!  However, I still got to see a grand sun set on Saturday.

Sunset, 22 June 2013

We had a visitor.  That was lovely :-)  He enjoyed the whackiness of the bike riders and the ensuing parade, along with the street fair. Of course I took him to Pike's Place and ended his trip with a visit to the horror...

I wonder if this little boy's mum knew
he was trying to pull gum off the wall?
I've made two quilt tops, one to be a backing for the other.  I have to make a quilt sandwich and then baste it and quilt it and put the binding on.

Black hole sun...
I've had that on the brain for nearly two weeks

Instead I'm working on an old quilt top that I started when I was on chemo.  Alas I made the pieces two different sizes and they just don't play nicely together, so over the last year or so I've been pulling the large pieces apart and cutting them down and repiecing them.  I only have a handful of blocks to fix now, then I can make sure all the blocks are the same size, put them together and make a whizzy new quilt :-)

New/old quilt fun

I've been knitting baby stuff like bibs from kitchen cotton for all the new little second cousins that are popping up.



Cute little boy top.
No my shrivelled ovaries are not quivering.

I'm sure one of them will be big enough
to need this bib.

I have lots and lots of work to do.  I have to get a small demo of the current thing I'm working on done in another eight days.  Yikes!  I spent today working out how to do "shared actions" in Captivate, which we use for creating our interactive training stuff.  I dunno if I've gotten it right yet.

No trip to Seattle should miss this view
And topping off the excitement around here, DH upgraded the OS on my computer for me.  It would not let me upgrade it.  I should've taken that as a hint cos

O
M
G

Why do I do this to myself?  He said it was working well on his machine, but I have a different graphics card (which Canonical seems to loathe) and between graphics weirdness and keyboard/usb weirdness, I have not been having fun times with my computer.  I could only type one letter every second or so yesterday, then it randomly got better but other stuff broke instead.  And I'm having to run Unity at the moment rather than Gnome.  Unity is designed for touchscreen stuff, rather like Windows 8, and it is about as comfortable to use on a non-touchscreen device.

Obligatory flower pic
An Austin rose, ?Graham Thomas?
It's not as if my computer is underpowered - it has 8 stonking quick CPUs, massive amounts of memory, a gigabyte motherboard (this means something apparently) and a Rather Large hard drive.   It's supposed to be a gamer machine, and if a computer could cry because it is underused, mine would.  It's not like my poor old laptop which limped and stumbled along.  My measure of a computer is how many Firefox tabs can I open - this one doesn't even blink an eye at 150 tabs.  The old laptop slowed to a crawl at about 30 tabs because of memory leaks.

Sigh.  It is all a mystery to me, and I could rant for hours about it but meh.  Canonical (maintainer/developer of Ubuntu) does not want the small user market, they want megacorps that they can make money out of.   It is like raving about healthcare in the States - pointless.

anon!


Comments

  1. Happy 13th, that surely is a medal winning anniversary ! Oh man - I'm so impressed about your nudey bike experience!! Good on you!!! I love your quilty exploits, the Black Hole Sun is so striking!! Happy Solstice!

    ReplyDelete
  2. No, six years?? And thirteen years?? Where does the time go?? A medal is definitely in order.
    You would have been right at home at the Nude Dark MOFO swim!! Six hundred and one of you!!

    ReplyDelete

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