Goodbye, summer...

I drove up to Salem the other night to visit my old roomie Kristina....she's transferring to Biola and I'm pretty sure she's leaving a hole in my heart at the same time. We had a blast together. It was definitely one of those end-of-a-season kind of nights. I have a new roomie though... my 3rd roomie in 3 semesters... stable, eh? Her name is Adrian and she seems really really sweet. I get to meet her in a few days. She's from Alaska!

I'm SO excited to get out of this house... I love my family but man, I just can't stomach two more summers at home like this. I'm sure in 2 weeks I'll be eating my words as I take 20 credits and work 10 hrs on the weekends. Summer with chores and rules and curfews will sound awfully nice. Or just sleep in any sort of quantity might sound nice.

I have four more days nannying. It's been a bunch of fun. These girls have been a treat to work with. Occasionally they could be a bit of a handful, but it's good anyway. And it doubles as practice for when my own children are 20 times the handful because they would be their mother's children. It'd come standard. Maybe I should do more of this practice business...

Jon and I had been planning for a date night last night for a week or so before I head back to school. It ended up being a night in Portland, which is always a treat. We found a pizza restaurant downtown called Old Town Pizza and it was in this big old building that was probably a house or something at some point. It is rumored to be haunted. Inside it was really dark and just lit by candlelight and there were tons of different rooms to sit in to eat. We ended up at this little table in the corner underneath an open staircase. The table was an old sewing machine table minus the sewing machine. I think Jon was a little claustrophobic but he didn't really admit it. He just kept saying afterwards how dark it was so he was afraid it would have been a bad place to be. I thought it was charming. I guess if each of us were to get haunted, I'd be the one to come out unscathed. The pizza was great though! Afterwards we had planned to walk along the riverfront there downtown but it was kind of a rainy evening so it was darker earlier... and there were some shady personalities down there. We abandoned that plan rather quickly. We were parked really close to a Max station though so we decided to ride down to the Lloyd Center and Jon called up his sister to meet us since she lives in Portland and we had a couple hours to spare yet. I was kind of thinking "uh, it's a date, dude." but we don't get to see her as often as we used to so it was good to visit. Lloyd was kind of boring (sorry Lloyd..) so we decided to drive to Mt Tabor which Beckii said is one of 2 extinct volcanoes within city limits in the US. The other is in Bend. Good job, city planners of Oregon. Well we took a few wrong exits so we ended up just driving around Portland which was fine. Portland is pretty at night. Except when we missed a little onramp that was impossible to see and tried to turn around on another street that happened to actually be just a little driveway thing into a homeless camp. I think we blinded 'em. We headed back to my car eventually and headed for the airport.

My cousin Christian is going to be living with us this year. He's 15 and needed to get away from the situation he was in at home in Michigan. He flew into PDX last night hence we moved our date up to Portland to pick him up. He arrived at like 11:30 so we didn't get home until 2:30. He chatted with us for a couple of hours but dropped off as we were going through Salem. We didn't talk much about the fact that he was here for the reasons he'd be here but we did talk about Oregon a little bit. He'd never been out before. He said three things: 1) There are a lot of pine trees here! 2) The air out here smells really good. 3) So where do you guys shop at? Haha. We played the "Say that Oregon word" with him and he did pretty good actually. He had mostly easy ones though, like Oswego and Tualatin. The good ones he was sleeping already... Siuslaw, Willamette, Albany... I did brief him on life in Corvallis: DUCKS ARE BAD. BEAVERS ARE GOOD. GREEN IS BAD. ORANGE IS GOOD. He didn't really get it. He will in time. All in good time. The rooming situation is gonna be a little different with him around. I think my parents want him upstairs and since I'm only home on the weekends that means he gets my room. My brother Matt is planning on moving out soon also and it'd be for good, so it looks like I'll get his room downstairs. Just like that, goodbye room!

I need to post about our reunion in Michigan still... but it'd be a long one and I've spent too much time on here today. Maybe I'll just do a bunch of pictures.