i heart summer

so here i am, day three into my vacation, and loving every second of it. mike b and i drove to seattle to pick my sister up yesterday (my sister jet-sets for a living. she stays home for her vacations) and i not only managed to successfully navigate seattle effortlessly (mike b is a superlative co-pilot), but on the way home also managed to choose a border guard who was so laid back that he didn't even look at our id. and her having been out of the country for six months. i was quite tickled by my luck.

friday i joined maktaaq for some international cuisine at one of my fave spots down on main street. (by the by, lime, i took her to the same place that you and i went - was just as good, but i was sorely tempted to try "the best cocktail in the world". good for me, though, i refrained). we had some good girl gossip (the three g's - so much more important than the three r's), and spoke of crushes on unavailable people, hiking and other fun topics...

speaking of g.g.g., i'm really happy to have my sister home again. we've always been really close, so these last years of her living elsewhere have been tough. what i was noticing today, and is really quite funny, is that we pack totaly 'typical' sister stuff into the first couple of days she's home - meaning, she goes through her stuff and hands over the stuff that i would have stolen if we'd been living in the same place, and i do the same. so i've come out of it with some new shoes, and some new clothes, and vice versa. i also presented her with the pink hello kitty flip flops that i picked up for her last week, much to her delight.

i'm still having some trouble with the food thing - had a nasty (though in retrospect quite comical) experience yesterday in the pike place market. i found myself urgently needing to throw up my lunch, so booked it to the nearest public washroom. i've never tossed in a public place without being drunk, which offers you some, um, more liberal standards in your choice of commode. by which i mean that you are a little less cautious about allowing any part of your body to come in contact with any fixture in the commode. yesterday, however, i was hovering over the toilet desperately trying to balance without touching anything, and simultaneously keep all of my lunch within the bowl. the stalls in the pike place market have those little half doors - i imagine that any number of people looked over the door and saw me there, precariously poised over the toilet in a most compromising position. at the time, quite traumatizing. as i think back on it, rather comical... so if you were there around 1pm yesterday, giggling at the spectacle, hi, that was me :)