In a nutshell

Damn, today has been a LONG day. I finally got a Washington driver’s license, an emissions test on the Jeep, new Washington plates for the Jeep, changed my address for voter’s registration AND got a screw pulled out of my rear tire that has been there since I left California. Time seems to be flying. School doesn’t start for another month and a half so I have been slowly easing in to my new environment. One thing I have noticed is the lack of good places to eat. There are a few but none of them hold a candle to what I had back in the Bay Area. I thought I was just a little home sick for my old stomping grounds but after talking to the guy behind the counter at the DMV, who was from Concord California, there are little or no good places to eat. Hahahahaahaha; that was the first thing he mentioned missing since they moved. Maybe I should just open a restaurant and call it “Our food doesn’t suck”. There are some cool things to do, don’t get me wrong. Two weeks ago my mom asked if I wanted to go take a tour through the Tillamook cheese factory. That was pretty interesting AND entertaining. That place pumps out a crap load of cheese in a day. It also has the highest number of thick necked, stumpy looking visitors and one things for sure…..they like their cheese. I thought it looked more like vultures attacking an antelope but it was the free cheese tasting area and a cheese/ice cream shop. Heh. This week I tagged along with my mom and some of her friends to Tacoma to see their glass museum. I found out that Dale Chihuly has a lot of his work on display so I begged then to let me tag along because he is one of my favorite artists. My mother was the youngest in her little group of friends and the oldest was 84. Whooo! Hooo! Party time! Hahahaha. They all turned out to be pretty funny. One of them has problems sleeping at night so every once and a while she drops off to sleep. Some times in mid sentence then she would wake up and start talking again. Heh. We took the train to Tacoma which was pretty cool as well. I have never been on an Amtrak train but it was kind of like riding on a roller coaster/car. I ended up being the one who kept track of time so we didn’t miss out train and I made sure they all got to the shuttle that brought us from the train station to the museum. So far the weather has been over cast and cool. We had a week where it was in the 90’s but ever since then it has been in the 70’s. Last week we had a nice storm that ripped through the Portland Vancouver area with up to 70 mile per hour winds and dumped a few inches of rain all in the span of about 40 minutes then stopped. It was weird. I took some movies during all the stages so I’ll have to post them. It was pretty wild. The news stations keep talking about massive thunder storms but I haven’t seen anything so far. I did hear one small boom during the short storm but so far that’s it. I think they are just teasing me.

 

These are from the Tillamook factory:

 

 

These are some of the Chihuly works that were on display outside the museum: