a railway station/on a long forgotten line/no destination/but it always leaves on time

I have to make this kind of quick....thankfully blogger DID save my draft so I don't have to go over it again! but I will add a few things. :P

I have officially been 18 for one week now. my birthday was great.....I did have to go to school, but we drove up to Seattle at 11:00 and spent the whole afternoon at Pike Place Market: one of my favorite places on earth! I think we went to almost every shop there - just ignored the ones that I already knew weren't interesting. went to Starbucks of course. the used bookstore down on the third level (downstairs) is still my fave place and I could spend so much time in there! I have to ask the owner where he's from. he's the coolest, nicest guy EVER. great store, cheap books, lots of character.

we found the gum wall! and, of course, stuck gum on it - bought expressly for that purpose. actually, though we planned to look for it, we ran accross it early in the day, by accident. if you haven't been, GO.

we ate. a lot.....a lot a lot a lot. haha good food is just.....I don't know, I have a thing for really good food. maybe it's because my family has been on the tighter end of the budget scale for a long time, so it's really a treat to have stuff like a good French cheese, expensive seasonal fruits, etc. not saying it's a bad thing though - I like for it to be special and out-of-the-ordinary. actually, it made my birthday really special, because (without sounding gluttonous), good food is important to me. we went to this little French creperie for "lunch" and I got a strawberry/whipped cream/nutella/powdered sugar crepe which was Amazing. with a capital A. I though $10 was really expensive for a crepe, but the thing was massive and oh so good. worth $10 any day of the week.

we wandered around and took pics and basically did everything I wanted to do. when we'd seen everything and were starting to get a little fatigued, we packed up, and went to Naan 'n Curry (my fave Indian restaurant in Renton) for dinner. after buying a scratch ticket at the grocery store, because I'm 18 now so I can. :D Spent $1 and won $2......not so bad.

a couple of days ago I got a birthday letter from my good friend Kelsey who's off at school in MN. that made my day, because she's really special to me and it was so nice to hear from her. and you know how it is when you get all this attention and stuff on your birthday, and then like three days later you get a card and it's like leftover birthday happiness? It's just special.

so then I was really enchanted yesterday when my friend Tanya finally got the me card she's been trying to get to me all week! we usually work out twice a week and see each other in passing at other times, but for various reasons we weren't able to meet until yesterday. I opened the card when I got home....one of those musical cards. It plays that song:

You know you make me wanna.....SHOUT!

throw my hands up and.........SHOUT!

etc.

LOVE this song (at least, for a birthday card it's really fun), and several of my Shakespeare class friends (and my teacher) signed it and wrote notes. it was so sweet, and given that I had a rather lousy day yesterday, it really brought a smile to my face.

another funny thing - I found out last Wednesday that my Shakespeare teacher and I have the same birthday. I was so sad that I couldn't go to Shakespeare Club last week (since we were at Pike Place), because they were throwing a surprise party for Jen and it would have been so much fun to be there. :( but I did see her on Wednesday and we wished each other happy birthday, and she made a point of telling me that the two of us were born during the Aquarian week of Genius.

Genius, she said, repeating the word by itself for emphasis.

yet another great part of my birthday was getting my backpack!!!!!! the one I'm taking to Europe. it was my birthday gift from my grandparents.....I picked it out so I've known about it (and been counting down the days) since Thanksgiving. I've been really excited to see, realistically, just how much I can cram into it.

So I spent most of Monday working on my packing list for Europe. Now that I have my backpack, packing cubes, and quite a bit of the stuff I'm actually taking to Europe, I decided to try packing the thing and seeing how much stuff I needed to ditch. All over the internet, the main stuff I'm seeing is "lay out everything you need, put half of it away and pack the rest." Needless to say, not everything on my idealist, optimistic packing list fit conveniently into my backpack. Luckily, more than half of it does fit. After reading one girl's testimonial about wearing one pair of jeans for a whole month without washing them, I decided that I could indeed bring a pair of the cursedly heavy denim stuff, but cut back to only one other pair of pants - some capris. This gives me barely room for four T-shirts, 5 camis/tanks, and a sundress. And a sarong (you have no idea how insanely many things you can do with a sarong). The only thing I can't fit into the bag right now is a hoodie and a waterproof jacket. I do take heart, however, when I remember that I'll be wearing something that's currenly in the bag, leaving a little more space.

The only real problem I have then, is that the bag weighs 30 pounds and I need it to weigh something closer to 20. 25 would be manageable. I'm not sure yet where I'm going to squeeze stuff. Having a tent strapped to the bag and a sleeping bag stuffed in the bottom is my main problem, but there's really nothing I can do about those things; I do need them. We'll see what happens. For now, it's a start.

Ok, last thing and then I'm off. last night, after a really long day of school, working out, teaching all afternoon, rushing to finish massive amounts of art history, and trying to fit in dinner and an actual conversation with my dad, I then got to drive out to Enumclaw for a 9:00 PM worship practice. needless to say, I still had stuff to do and would much rather have gone to bed at this point than Enumclaw to practice for goodness knows how long.

BUT, I ended up having a really good time. It was just us instrumentalists, and actually our leader wasn't even there for most of it. what we really wanted to do was just go over certain songs, and bring lots and lots of ideas about what we could do....with transitions, with instrument parts, etc. we never have time to do this kind of stuff on Saturday because we're rushing just to pull everything together before the evening service. so having this extra time was, first of all, a great time to work on changing things up in our songs a bit. beyond that, it was nice for us to be able to play together and listen to each other a little bit - three weeks is a long time to not play with each other and then all of a sudden try and pull a service together in three hours. and it was all a lot less stressed than our normal practice, because we didn't have specific goals or time limits......just play and work on some ideas.

and I just love the guys I play with, so very much. I've said it before (and probably will again) - they are like uncles to me. really good uncles. we had a lot of fun hanging out, talking about music and other stuff, and just jamming together. it felt good. it was 11:00 when we left the church, but I felt a lot less exhausted and more peaceful than I had all day. relationships can be such wonderful, wonderful things.