And OR Fun

As I mentioned previously I recently went up to Bend, Oregon to check out the OSU-Cascades Campus.  I had Dad drive up with me so that we could do the drive in one shot, it’s about a twelve hour drive.  He drove over here on Wednesday then Thursday morning we hit the road for the long haul.  We then drove back down on Tuesday.  Luckily we had a rather uneventful drive up and we really only hit construction once while I was driving but we only had to slow down to about 45mph.  The drive back down was equally smooth though we did have to slow to 25mph for about a quarter mile at one point.

I love being able to ride shotgun through beautiful areas because I don’t have to watch the road and I can take about 20 photos with my phone so that I can get one pretty good shot of Mt Shasta.  We ended up getting a lot closer as we drove the 5 but by that time I was tired of getting photos of the trees along the side of the road.

Friday we checked out the OSU-Cascades campus and then did a tiny bit of scoping out of where the nearby apartments are and what the areas look like.  We didn’t do too much looking since there’s no need to do too much until I get in for sure!  (Here’s hoping!!)

That evening we then went to Bend’s 6th annual Brewfest for a few hours.  Over thirty breweries were represented with two brews each available to taste.  Of course there was food too and apparently an area had foosball and ping-pong but I never did see that area.  I think they were misleading us.  I had four 4oz tastings and my favorite by far had the best name: Skip and Go Naked, and it was brewed by Mt. Shasta Brewing Co.  It was a light, strawberry ginger ale.  I also chose to snack on a super yummy blueberry lemon crepe.  Sure I ended up with powdered sugar on my jeans but that was a badge I was proud to wear.  I would have bought another if we were there long enough.

The beer in the photo was not Skip and Go Naked, but one I didn’t care for very much, Moose Drool a brown ale by Big Sky Brewing Co.   And if you were wondering, yes I do get to keep my mug.  In fact, it’s chillin’ in my freezer now.  Ha, get it?  Chillin’ in my freezer?!

Sunday we got to really hang out with my uncle Kris.  We went out to his place and then Kris, Jan, Dad and I went to Three Creeks Brewing for drinks, food and to play pool.  I was going to be driving home so I sampled their soda selection and enjoyed the Pepsi that they had on tap.  One of the things that we ordered was a starter, Cheese & Crawfish Dip, and it was so good!  I’ve never had crawfish before but the flavors in this dip were to die for.  After our food we relocated to the pool table and Kris, Dad and I played quite a few games.  Turns out that despite some really good shots I’m not good enough to beat Dad.  We would play winner and Dad never lost but I always beat Kris.  Sure quite a few games were won thanks to a scratch on the 8 ball or calling the wrong pocket but hey, we were having fun so it didn’t matter!  I have no photos of this because I was silly and didn’t take my purse which had my camera inside.

Our last day in town the Grandparents drove us on a very large loop of the mountains and lakes to the west of Bend and it was beautiful!  We stopped at Elk Lake to stretch our legs and have some ice cream (I opted for blackberry) and I was able to get some photos.

Doesn’t this seem like a beautiful place to spend a summer day?

It’s ok, take a mental vacation here for a moment.  There’s plenty of seating available!

Loves.

Summer Homework

Nobody on summer break wants to have homework.  Especially when it’s self-assigned homework.  That is what I’ve been slowly but surely working on this summer.  Two different self-assigned tasks.  The first one was by far the most fun and the second one is much more time consuming and important.

The first was working on a “Best Of Santa Barbara” guide for a friend at work who is transferring to UCSB this fall.  I thought that it’d be nice for her to have a quick cheat sheet for finding the best hangouts or restaurants.  I think that every school should have a welcoming committee for transfer students with a best of guide.  I know that I would have found one useful transferring to CSUB.  For the longest time I was driving to a post office 3.5 miles away when there’s one 1.5 miles in the other direction.  Oh well.

Today is her final day at work before she moves to SB so I gave her the guide yesterday when we both worked.  It ended up being about 10 typed pages which I broke up into different categories such as “Food & Drink”, “Going Out”, “Hobbies & At Home Entertainment” and “All About You”.  Then I had some fun with stickers.  So in the end it ended up being pretty cool looking and she was so surprised that she ended up tearing up a bit.  Go me, mission accomplished!  Not that my mission was to make her cry, more of to surprise her with something that she’d really like and be able to use.

My second homework assignment has been to investigate graduate programs for my masters degree in counseling psychology.  Quite a few graduate schools have psychology programs but about half of those are doctorate programs or are research based degrees.  So right there, I lose a lot of options.  Then I don’t want to live in Los Angeles so again, a reduction in options.  Anyways, I’ve been trying to determine where I want to go to school next and then potentially begin my career.

Right now my number one pick is Oregon State University’s program.  Their program is not on the main campus in Corvallis, Oregon (south of Salem) but in Bend, Oregon (east of the mountains).  Last week I was able to check out the campus.  Dad and I drove up in one day to my grandparents’ place in Bend and stopped by the school the next day to check it out and talk to a woman on campus about the program.  I was surprised at the size of their campus.

That’s basically it.  One big building.  But it is on the Central Oregon Community College campus so they apparently share resources such as the student union, library, and bookstore.  But the plus about there just being one big (and did I mention nice?) building is that in the winter I won’t be schlepping from one building to another.

Hopefully this will be a common sight this next school year.  And my “Don’t Be Trashy, Recycle” bumper sticker would be more congruent with the attitudes of Bend than those of Bakersfield.  But I won’t get into that now.

Loves.

A Casual 4th of July

I hope everyone enjoyed their 4th of July.  I didn’t have any real plans for two reasons: 1) I had a call-in shift at work and 2) I didn’t make any plans.  The extent of my planning for the 4th included me thinking “well, if I don’t work I can do whatever I want…maybe I’ll have some barbeque…”  Ended up they used my call-in at work but then it was so slow they sent me home an hour early.  Déjà vu from last year when they sent me home early on the 4th because it was, shocker, slow!  Actually, slow isn’t the correct word here, dead is more accurate.  But I didn’t mind either way since I didn’t have any plans to get messed up and I was getting paid overtime since it was a holiday.  Woo-hoo!!

Once they sent me on my way I figured that I might as well have some barbeque or at least something with barbeque sauce.  Gotta stick with my semi-plan from earlier and it’s only appropriate on the 4th to have barbeque.  So I went to Wingstop.  Their boneless chicken wings are so yummy and their fries are always perfectly salted/seasoned.

After dinner I had a mini-marathon of Cheers while waiting for the sun to go down and the fireworks to begin.  I’ve always enjoyed Cheers but I recently discovered that Hallmark channel airs about 6 episodes a night and they’re running through the entire series in order.  So I’ve been Tivo’ing it and watching it when I have lunch or before bed.  Though sometimes I feel guilty when I’m watching late at night because I laugh really hard.  Especially to the intro from this episode:

Seriously hilarious.  I was crying from laughing so hard.  And then once I mostly recovered, I rewound it and watched it again.  And again.  And again.  Then when mom came to visit me I made her watch it.  And then I rewound it and we watched it again and again.  Still funny.

Ok, so I’ll pause on my love of Cheers and get back to the 4th.  Fireworks are legal here (um, hello emergency personnel who’ll never get the 4th off) so I was thinking I’d just walk out to the street to enjoy the show that my neighbors would be putting on with their purchased exploding devices.  It was pretty cool and they’d loaded up the street so there was no shortage of sparklers, screamers, whizzers, sparkers, wing-dingers, and whateverers.  Shortly after I headed out the big fireworks show that the near by country club hosts started.  That’s the show that last year Jaslynn and I watched from a nearby neighborhood.  Turns out, I can see it from my mailbox!

Someone even had AC/DC playing and it was a much better soundtrack to fireworks than the normal patriotic fare.  Not that I have anything against being patriotic, but a slow version of “God Bless America” doesn’t have the same punch as “T.N.T.” or “Thunderstruck” when paired with fireworks.

At the end of the night, it was a nice, causal 4th of July.

Loves.

It’s So Close I Can Taste It

Finals are next week, summer break right after that.  I know it’s so close, and I’m more than ready for it, but at the same time I almost want just a smidge more time before my finals.  I have one paper to do and one six-ish page take home final to do and it’s always good to have too many than too few hours to write.  Though I must admit, sometimes the caffeine fueled late night writing juices are pretty good.  But the late night writing juices mean that I don’t get as much dream time in.  And I love my dream time.  Especially since daydreaming in my class has more distractions that good old fashion sleep dreaming.

Here’s the one part of this quarter that I am ready to be long, long over: sitting through Health Psychology “lectures”.  Basically our instructor stands behind the computer reading the slides of the powerpoint word for word in a voice that’d be perfect if she were a preschool teacher.  Three minutes in, I check out.  But don’t worry, I’ve found a few solutions to my boredom: 1) write letters 2) draw 3) ditch.  Option three has been my favored solution, especially since she posts the slide shows on-line so I can review them on my own and still kick butt on the tests.  Seriously, I won’t go for weeks and still manage an A on the tests.

You can’t tell, but I was totally doodling all over my paper.  Right below where I wrote the date and all of one sentence of notes.  I just was hoping she’d give us a five minute break so I could leave and read.  Not that she’d notice if I had read in class…at least one person was reading and probably five people on my side of the room were texting.  Yeah, it’s that engaging.

So until Thursday here’s hoping for good writing juices so that I can enjoy summer break sooner.

Loves.

Serena Ryder, Mary Ellen, and Me

As promised, here’s the photo from the meet and greet at the end of the Kelly Lounge Friday night.

When we were standing there for the photo they had the slowest count down from 3 that I’ve ever heard.  Someone could have counted to ten in normal countdown speed.  I’m surprised everyone isn’t blinking.

And man, do I need a tan!

Loves.

Serena Ryder at Kelly Lounge

As I posted the other day I’d “won” tickets to the Kelly Lounge to see Serena Ryder perform.  I went over to the Fox Theater right after work and got there about five minutes before Serena hit the stage.  My friend from work, Mary Ellen, met me there and we sat pretty close to the stage.  Not that getting a good, nay, great seat would be too difficult, they only gave out 150ish tickets and not everyone that “won” even showed up.  Idiots.  It’s a FREE show!

She came out, chatted a bit, and then opened the show with her current single All For Love.

I took videos of parts of the show.  This video is the first verse and chorus of All For Love.  She sounds so good live, definitely not an artist that needs any assistance in the recording studio.

(Sorry if the photos may be a bit blurry, I didn’t use flash so I had to use a longer exposure time.)

I liked the fact that she would stop between songs and chat about her songs or her boots.  A kid in the audience said that she liked her boots and that she was wearing boots too.  It was pretty funny.  She seems like a really cool person and I hope that she is very successful.

Serena played about 5 songs (the Kelly Lounge is short but intimate) before the meet and greet.  While standing in line to meet her I bought one of her cds for $10 so I could get her to sign it.  Plus after hearing her live I would totally buy her album anyways.

Afterwards Mary Ellen and I went to dinner at this little joint called Happy Jack’s.  It’s been in Bakersfield for 30 years and the food is scrumptious.  You walk in the front door and there is only counter seating and about 16 seats.  They are known for their burger and pies and let me tell you, they deserve it.  The burger was yummy and yummy with a bunch of delish thrown in for good measure.  Then we had pie.  I died.  Sooooo good!  Pineapple coconut cream pie, dead.  Apple crisp a la mode?  Killer.  I wasn’t sure if I would recover, but I came back to life just so that I could die again at a later date.

Loves.

A Little Luck and Some Major Skill

There are two radio stations that I listen to regularly here in B-field.  The first is KLLY (Kelly) 95.3, a top hits station and the second is KRAB 106.1, a rock station.  Kelly is home of the “world famous Kelly lounge”, a intimate concert held at the Fox theater which has featured over 90 artists and bands since it began over 8 years ago.  Previous artists that have appeared include Michelle Branch, Ben Folds, Phantom Planet, Jason Mraz, Collective Soul, Gavin DeGraw, Josh Kelley, Ok Go, Augustana, Gavin Rossdale, and Adele.  Some artists play a show before they are very popular and others (Adele) appear after their song is regularly making radio play.

Over the weekend Kelly kept playing a teaser that the next artist to visit the Kelly Lounge would be announced Tuesday at 2:25 in afternoon on Facebook.  They also were saying that the first 100 people to RSVP would receive free tickets to the show.  I don’t have class on Tuesdays until 3:10 so I was able to have my laptop out to try to “win” some tickets.  The concert date and artist appearing were posted and I was number 88 to RSVP, earning myself free tickets to the show.

Tomorrow I’ll be stopping by the studio to pick up my tickets for Friday night’s Kelly lounge featuring Serena Ryder.  Her current single is All For Love, it’s pretty good and her voice kind of reminds me of Melissa Etheridge.

I’ll post any photos from the show this weekend.

Loves.