'Tis the Season

Its that time of year again, for parties, eating, drinking, spending time with family and friends. It always comes with mixed feelings, as I am grateful for the friends I have here, but always miss my family, who are so far away.  I have met lots of new people over the past couple of months, and am feeling that my surrogate family is expanding.  I am very fortunate to have so many wonderful people in my life.  Both those that I know in person, and those that I have met through the virtual world.

I lived in the US for almost 8 years now (It will become 8 on Jan 5th).  My first Christmas here was spent alone, in my small apartment in downtown Portland.  I remember being unable to reach my parents by phone, as they were on vacation in South Africa, and sometime in the evening the power went out, so I was all alone in the dark.  It was quite possibly the worst Christmas I've ever had. 

Since then I have invited friends over to my house every Christmas day, and have had anything from 2 people to close to 20 stop by.  It makes Christmas feel like Christmas to me, if I am able to open up my home, cook for people and share the day.

I could of course go back to the UK for Christmas, but now I have made my own tradition here.  It might not be a conventional Christmas spent with family, but my friends out here in the PNW have become my family.  I still get so excited about Christmas day that I wake up around 4am (as you can imagine, my husband is not really impressed by that).  I try and stay queit as I make my way downstairs and start to prepare the turkey and trimmings.

Then around 8am, when I can stand it no more, I go back upstairs to wake up the husband.  He cooks a wonderful breakfast, and we have memosa's, eat then beginning the gifting process.  Presents are pulled from under the tree and placed in the relevant piles (myself, hubby and of course the cats :) ).  We make our way through, topping up the memosa's as we go.  Then its time for me to get back in the kitchen.  By now the Christmas music is blasting.

As our friends start to show up, the party begins, with food and drink to spare, we have a merry time, drinking, talking, dancing, drinking, dancing, drinking sleeping.

Other than Christmas day it's self, my favourite holiday moment, is decorating the house.  I have boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations, and put up several trees.  I love going through the ornament boxes and finding all those memories. Ornaments that my mum and I bought when I was going through a rough patch in life, and my mum was there to support me.  Items from my childhood, decorations off the family tree from 30 years ago.  We were recently able to add to the collection, ornaments from Ryan's childhood, there are homemade ornaments in there, one's that move, and ones from his grandma. 

As bittersweet as Christmas can be, it is certainly a time when you remember loved ones, it's a wonderful occassion to be surrounded by family/friends.

A Word of the Day...

A search for "word of the day" today returned: Cathexis
I had never even heard of this word before, let alone did I have any idea what it meant.
According to http://www.merriam-webster.com here's the definition:

noun

: investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea

After trying to find out more about this word, I end up reading about  Sigmund Freud.   Its been a long time since I've spent much time thinking about Freud.  I had to study him, well I suppose really, his theories when I was at University, which was one heck of a long time ago. (This is where I start to realise my age, and quickly dive back to my original train of thought). 

Essentially it seems that Freud believed that  psychic energy is generated by the libido. (of course it is.. where else would it come from).

This psychic energy is released through biological means known drives. A drive has two parts: a biological need and a psychological need. Then of course what I am reading starts to get into the id, the ego and the superego, and all of a sudden, distant bells start ringing, and I actually start to remember some of the things I learnt at Uni oh those many years ago.  Seems it wasn't a waste after all.  My parents will be so happy.

Ultimately, what I realised is that I didn't think I'd ever heard this word before, but that really isn't possible, been as I spent a substantial amount of time studying the id, ego and superego.  Apparently I just suppressed the memory of Cathexis.  Only for it to rear it's head x number of years later.

What I most certainly do remember is having a biological need for a drink, and then somehow ending up at the pub.  My id, ego and superego apparently had that figured out.  When my id conjured up an image of a drink, my ego saw that as a beer, and then sent me off to the student union, to quench the biological need for a beverage.  Apparently in these situations, my ego did not feel the need to respond with anticathexis, as it did not deem going to the pub for a nice cold beer as an unacceptable action.

Now I am delving further into Freud's theories (again), partly to see how much I remember, partly because I still find it intriguing. (by no means does this mean that I necessarily agree with all of this theories).

Really?

While trying to do anything but work today, I came across this Mail Goggles

Seriously… what else is google going to start doing for us. Does it realize that it’s a corporation and not our best friend. Friends are there to prevent us from drunk dialing our ex’s or latest crush, they are there to advise us not to send that message, to confiscate our phones when needed. I realize that friends are not always right there when we write that drunken email. But you know what, they are there the next day when we realize what we’ve done, they are there to give us support to deal with the repercussions and to laugh with us about the whole thing.

I think it’s a little silly that google provides us with “Mail Goggles”. I mean don’t get me wrong, if you really have no will power when inebriated or otherwise and need a piece of technology to prevent you from doing something you’d later regret, and you aren’t able to cope with the consequences of making a mistake, then well, I guess this is the thing for you, but what are you going to do when google isn’t there for you…?

Still Here

I have not gone yet. You get me for today and tomorrow, and then I leave you in the (capable) hands of Max and Damian. I must be crazy.

Last night we had a team building happy hour. My boss had prepared a few questions and we played a round of 2 truths and lie. I am curious if you can figure mine out:

1. My Dad has met Nelson Mandela.
2. I lived in 4 continents over a 3 year period.
3. I have sky dived.

Do you know which is the lie? No one that I worked with got it right.

One of the questions she asked was, when did you have your first taste of an alcoholic beverage?

One of the guys I work with grew up in the Philippines, when he was 11 he sold cigarettes at the cock fighting ring. After the fight was over, he tasted some beer for the first time. Its always interesting to hear stories like this about people you work with, I would never have guessed that he did that as a child.

I don't really remember the first time I tasted alcohol, but I do remember the first time I was drunk. I was up in Scotland with my friend from high school, we were 15 or 16 at the time. I was drinking Scrumpy Jack. I didn't have that many, 1 or 2 I think (but I could be wrong), but gosh I was trolleyed. We were crossing the street, and I looked down, my legs were going so fast. I thought to myself "this is sweet, when you're drink you don't have to think about anything, your body just takes care of itself". Well the next thing I knew I was lying on the ground, I had well and truely bombed it to the floor. My friend kindly helped me up and guided me to her aunts house. Some creepy guy came up to us at some point in this process, and asked if we needed some help. My friend gave a sharp "NO", I of course was trying to chatter away to this helpful man...

Once in the door, up the stairs and into bed, the room started to spin... and I started to feel a little ill... as I chunted away, my friend became more and more impatient with me, and finally got tired of telling me that the room was not spinning but I was in fact just drunk, so she told me just to shut up and go to sleep... nice friends I have :)

Summer Solstice

I had such a pleasant weekend. It was very low key. Friday, I ended up going to bed early (I am starting to get old, being in bed before 11pm on a Friday, not sure what's up with me). Saturday we got up and went out to get breakfast (we try and get up before 10am every weekend day, so we can go out and get a scrumy breakfast) before getting our weekend errands out of the way.

We spent the rest of the day being lazy.

A friend of ours was having a Summer Solstice party Saturday night, so we headed over there.

It was a lot of fun, they have a pool in their backyard, and had lit the yard up with lots of candles. We drank, and chatted then had a swim in the pool for a bit.

I met some really great people, and had conversations about all types of things. I really do enjoy meeting new people and learning about their stories. I love to hear the different points of view that people have. We got talking about luck. Did you know that statistically certain birth months are luckier than others. Apparently May and July are the luckiest… I was born in July, and I have to admit, I do think of myself as being a lucky person. This comes from a book called Quirkology. It caused quite a discussion. I believe that people create their own luck to some extent, I also believe people have more influence over their bad luck than their good luck. I think far to many people attribute poor decision making to bad luck, as they don’t want to take responsibility for the decision’s they make. But that is just my opinion.

We also got talking about the “Book of Questions”. I’d never heard of this things, but turns out I was the only one at the party who hadn’t. People started rattling off questions, it was quite fun to see the different ways people would respond to a situation.

The intent of the party was to celebrate Summer Solstice. I am not pagen, nor were most of the people at the party, but I think it was a great excuse for a party. We were not the only ones to be celebrating. Back in the UK thousands of people gathered together at Stonehenge to celebrate.

Crash(ing good time)

What with the new job and getting the apartment sorted out ready for the wbf’s father arriving this week, I really have been neglecting my blog.

I’ve actually been quite disconnected from the rest of the world the past week. For one thing my cell phone hardly works, the battery lasts for all of about 30 mins, I can’t access text messages or my phonebook. It’s quite pathetic. I am waiting on getting a blackberry through work, which should be here this week, then things will get better. I’ll even be able to write and post blog posts from it, so I’ll have no excuse.

As well as my phone not working, I haven’t really be logged in much from home the past week, I have no idea why, I just was busy doing other things I suppose. Its not that things were especially busy last week, but the new job really had me tired out.

The weekend was spent running errands and spending time with friends, so it was both productive and fun. Friday we had happy hour with some friends from work. We went a place that I am pretty sure I’ll not go to again. It was one of those places that likes to mix strange ingredients together, but it doesn’t really work. Instead of having Bloody Mary on the menu, they had Anemic Mary… made with celery juice rather than tomato… they had a vodka cocktail made with lavender… I am ok with trying new combinations, but these really didn’t taste good.

Saturday, we managed to get up at a decent time, went for breakfast then headed on to IKEA, we needed to buy a sofa bed/futon for our guest bedroom before his dad arrives. We found the one we were looking for, as well as a couple of things to help us out with storage. This Saturday was the Rose Festival in Portland, and we wanted to do our best to avoid the downtown craziness, so we then did a couple of other errands before going back home to take a nap and sort out our purchases.

We had plans to go out for dinner with our neighbour and his friend, we headed out to a place called the Kennedy School, it’s a really cool bar/restaurant. It is a school building which has been made into a hotel, restaurant and bar. The school itself shut down in 1975 due to the poor condition of the building and the cost to put it back into shape. I am not sure when the hotel opened, but it was a lot of fun walking around. Some of the classrooms are hotel rooms, others are bars, or function rooms. We ate dinner then headed back to our neighbours, for a couple more drinks. We always end up there until late, time just seems to disappear when we are with our neighbour. We had a blast though, I haven’t laughed so much in such a long time.

Sunday, didn’t really get off to a good start, we went to Goodwill to drop off some stuff, and as we pulled out of the parking space, the wbf and the guy in the space behind us pulled out at the same time, and the wbf’s car took the brunt of the damage. The tail-light is smashed, the bumper has a bump in it, and the trunk is now misaligned. Not much fun really…

The rest of the day was spent cleaning house, then we did our regular Sunday Soprano’s Session, we started season 2 yesterday. I am really getting into it, Tony’s mum really is a piece of work.

(I was) Gone (for a while)

I was gone for a few days, and it wasn't just because I couldn't think of anything to post.

The past weekend was Memorial Weekend here in the states, so I was busy having a good time. I ate a lot and drank a lot over the course of the weekend, I actually ate some really good food. Ended up at an English Pub on Sunday (it wasn't quite the same as the Slap and Tickle), and played some darts. I haven't played darts in a long time, and it really showed. We then headed over to the pool hall and played a game of snooker, I wasn't all that great at that either, but I could remember the rules, and was able to guide the lads through the game.

The last couple of days at work I have been in a class called "Team Leader Facilitator Training". It was a great class, and even throughout the long days I stayed focused the whole time, which is really saying something, as I am very easily distracted. Now I am back at my desk, wrapping up my current job before beginning the new one on Monday.

I'm really looking forward to the end of the work day today, as I'm going out for dinner with 2 former colleges. One is my ex-boss, and she is just great, she's one of the nicest people I've ever met, the other is a guy who was a project manager on a project from a few years ago. About 4 years ago, we were all on the same project, and took a business trip to Germany and Barcelona. We had such a great time, eating, drinking and generally being merry and goofing around. I'd tell some of the stories, but I have found from experience, that they just don't seem as funny to anyone else as they do to us. I am sure tonight will be full of reminiscing and lots of laughs.

In the Palm of Your Hand

I was just over at British Speak and and I see that relax max has been giving me some link love, so I thought I should actually sit down and write something.

I finally got to have some fun last week, and that is the main reason nothing was posted on my blog.

It began with a "country fair" at work on thursday, this meant free beer, bull rides, tattoos, palm reading, popcorn, corn dogs, arts and crafts, and goodness knows what else. However, we had lots of sun begining on Thursday too, and my fair skin got very burnt, there wasn't really any shady spots for me to be hiding in.

As mentioned above there was a couple of palm readers at the fair. I've never had my palm read before, so I figured what the heck. She was spookily accurate, it began with her telling me "well I can see right away that you are a sensitive person, you care a lot about other people and their happiness and will put them before yourself". She then went on to say, that I live to be in love (so true!), that I am a bit of a rebel. It ended with her talking about my relationship with wbf, and she couldn't have been more spot on there either... like I said... spooky :)

I don't remember doing much Thursday evening... I think we watched a movie, yup we did - Two for the Money, it was rather good. The rest of the weekend consisted of drinking, dancing and more drinking. All in all not a bad weekend.

Yesterday a friend came over, and we started to watch the Soprano's. We are going to get together every sunday afternoon and watch them all. Until yesterday I'd never seen any of them, the wbf has seen them all, and needless to say, this was his idea. We watched the first 3 episodes last night... so far I like it.

Man Eater

I have been having a serious lack of fun lately, too much work and not enough play makes Caroline a sad sack.

However, on Friday I was able to go out for dinner and a couple of drinks with my friends Meghan and Sandra. Its been a while since we all got together. We used to be good at meeting once a month for girls night, but the 3 of us are so busy. Meghan with her full time job, school and arts and crafts, me with my 2 jobs, ally program and arts and crafts, and Sandra with all her stuffies. We all have boyfriends too, so that doesn't help us on the spare time front.

Anyway, we decided to go have a nice dinner, so we headed to the NW 23rd area, and walked to the first place we saw. The waiter came over with our food menus, and more importantly, the martini menu. There was a martini called a Razz-a-tini, it was impossible for me to say this without doing a small shoulder shrug/jiggle, I am not really sure what it was, but it was amusing. I of course ordered that, with the jiggle. Meghan was after a Mandrini, however when she ordered it, it sounded more like man eater. (Not sure how she managed that, but the waiter nicely picked up on it). Sandra, boringly, order a cosmo. Off he went to make our drinks.

We started the whole catch up stories, the poor waiter had spent quite a long amount of time freshly sqeezing orange juice for some lady while we were busy selecting our drinks, just as he was about to begin ours, she came over and brought it back, it wasn't sweet enough... the poor guy. Needless to say, we then asked for ours to be freshly squeezed, and promised him we wouldn't send it back. Maneater, and freshly squeezed became the buzz words for the evening.

It finally ended up with the waiter telling Meghan that he would add some freshly squeezed man juice to her drink, no sooner did this statement leave his lips, than he went bright red, and declared that "well that didn't come out right!".

Yup, thats what happens when you let the 3 of us out of the house.

In the Navy, well not quite.

I must admit I have not been very good at writing to this blog the past few days. Partly its because I have been busy with the move, trying to do 2 jobs at work, and keeping my Etsy store going (I had 2 sales yesterday). But mainly its just because my mind has gone blank. I don't seem to be able to find anything to write about.

However, I am not one to give in to a challenge. So I started to re-read my previous blogs, and comments, to see if I could get inspired - is it bad I use myself as inspiration? I guess not been as this blog is mostly about me. (Yes I do talk to myself at times).

Well in my first post ( Song of Happiness: Joy. Song of happiness. Manly. ) Marmelade made a comment about those navy boys, and it reminded me of a night when I was in Cairns, and I said I'd write about it in a couple of days, and at this point a couple of days have already been and gone so its time.

Back in 2001, I was backpacking in Australia, I spent a fantastic week in Cairns, I saw my first crocodile, got extremely sun burnt that day. One of the girls in my room (Karen), was heading back to Sydney on the same flight that I was, our flight left at 6am, so we decided we'd pack the day before, and then head out drinking, and stay up all night, we figured this would be much easier than trying to get up early. As we were packing we decided to have a couple of bevies, it was rather hot you see, then we headed out with some folks from the hostel to one of the local bars, I think it was called The Wool Shed, but I could be wrong about that.
I did mention I was sun burnt

Needless to say we were both rather merry by the time we got there. As I was dancing away, I got talking to a very good looking Kiwi guy, it was already getting close to the end of the night, and I couldn’t find Karen. The guy and I decided to go get some food, so we left with his buddy. We picked up something to eat, and were trying to decide where to eat it. He suggested going back to his digs, I figured what the heck, so off we went.

We started heading towards the harbor, and I started to get a little worried, I was like, erm, there’s no hostels down here, where are you taking me?”, his response was, “we’re staying down here, its ok”, I was like, where. There was nothing down there but a bunch of boats, he then pointed at a huge navy ship, that’s where we’re going. I couldn’t believe it, I thought he was taking the mick. He tried to convince me he was serious, but I just wasn’t buying it, and I thought even if he was telling the truth there was no way I’d be allowed on the thing. Oh how wrong could I have been, all I had to do was show em my passport, and on I went. I ended up spending the rest of the night (at this point I think it was already about 3am), drinking rum and coke with the navy boys in the mess. I don’t even like rum, so I was just knocking it back…

It got to about 5:00 and I noticed the time, I panicked Cinderella style, picked up my stuff and started to leave, of course I had no clue how to get off the ship. The guys were asking what’s wrong, where you going, I explained I had a flight to catch, which left in one hour, I was escorted back to my hostel by 5 navy boys, it was pretty funny. When I got there Karen was still nowhere to be seen, and we had about 45 mins before our flight was due to leave, I went into my room to pick up my bag, and noticed I hadn’t even finished packing, I started throwing stuff into my bag, while trying not to wake the other girls in the room.

In the meantime Karen came back, we called a cab, and headed off to the airport in a drunken panic. We made it somehow to the airport with about 15 mins to spare, but of course there was a huge line, we made our way to the front, stinking of booze. The guy checking us in, was such a hunny. He told us to take our time, now our bags were checked, the plane couldn’t leave without us… we thought that was hilarious, so off we staggered. Karen somehow managed to fall over and twisted her ankle, so she had drunken hobble going on. We made it to the plane, and of course our seats were right at the back. I don’t think I’ve ever received so many dirty looks at one time. It was quite embarrassing, we’d held the plane up by about 15 mins, and were blatantly drunk, I am surprised they let us get on the plane. Of course, as soon as we sat down we fell asleep, the next thing I knew I’d landed back in Sydney, ready for another day of partying, before catching a flight to Perth later that day.

It was a rather odd night, and there's more to be told, but this post is already way to long withouth me adding to it.

Saturday Night

I didn’t get to post anything yesterday, as I was tired from the night before. The wbf and his housemates had a party on Saturday night. I headed over there in the early afternoon to help them get set up, although in the end I didn’t really do much, I just observed. It turned out to be a really fun night.

One of his housemates is in a band (the same band I went to see on Wednesday), so there was an all night jamming session going on in the basement. It was so much fun! They were great. Especially considering that most of them hadn’t met each other till that night, and certainly hadn’t played together before. I love going to parties at this house. There’s 4 guys living here including my wbf, and it is very much like a fraternity house. When there is a party here, there is such a wide range of people who show up, professionals, artists, musicians, models, unemployed, the 20 something’s and the 50 something’s. The conversations are interesting in so many ways, either because they are life stories, or just plain weird.

I was dancing away to the music, and my wbf comes over, seems we’d been invited to go to a hot tub at someone’s house… I looked at him, and said “hot tub”?, he said “yes”. I was confused, my thoughts ranged from a hot tub, is that a bar near here, or do they mean a proper hot tub. I don’t even know these people, what will I wear, I only have what I am wearing now… oh that’s the point, they don’t want me to wear anything… then I looked at my wbf, and said “erm, no thanks, not today! I am not really into people seeing my wobbly bits”. He just laughed, he knew what I’d say, but thought I’d get a kick out of it. I am quite a shy girl you know.
I went back to my dancing.

I then met a lovely couple outside, they’ve been married for 34 years, and are still very much in love. They were adorable.

It turned out to be a late night, I think we got to sleep about 5am, and typically, woke up at 9:30. The place was a mess, beer bottles, plates, glasses, food everywhere. However, with 4 people helping out, the clean up went pretty quick. The wbf and I then headed over to my place, and watched Manhatten, a Woody Allen movie. It was a nice lazy day.