Thursday, August 11, 2011

Screaming Sea Lion Video

!

My mother is amazing. When we were getting ready to wrap up our time in Newport yesterday, she pulled out her iPod Touch and she started filming. Yep. These sea lions are barking up a storm and it's hilarious. I imagined that they were yelling at us.

"Hey, we're napping! Quit staring at us and taking pictures. Do I take pictures of you when you're napping?"

Anyway, I still totally invaded their privacy by taking pictures and laughing at them. Poor sea lions

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Daycation 08.10.2011

Daycation: A day of rest in which you can do anything and everything you want as long as it’s completely unrelated to your daily activities. (Note: eating and drinking is expected in a Daycation, preferably of the special kind, you know… splurge! -both in calories and expense!)

Today was my daycation with my dad. You see, I’m leaving to Ukraine in just five days so my pops and I wanted to have a quality day of hang out time before I left for eleven months. My mom was supposed to be headed out of town so we decided to spend the day she left on an adventure of my choice. Well, as I started to think of ideas, I decided that I really just wanted my dad to be happy so I tried to get him involved. First, I wrote a list on my nametag at work. When I got home, I made him a short list. When he asked for more details, I expanded the list and wrote ideas for exactly what we could do/listen to during our fun day.

What I didn’t realize the whole time I was coming up with ideas was that I was really just stressing my dad out. He wasn’t excited because he didn’t know which choice was the right one. They were all GREAT choices, all he needed to do was to pick one.

Last night (Tuesday night), we had settled on a new plan. We would go to Portland to OMSI… and if we decided we didn’t want to go there, we would head to the zoo… Well, this morning that whole plan changed. Somehow, we made a plan to go to breakfast in McMinnville and then to go to the coast. It was madness.

It took at least two and a half hours to eat breakfast in Mac. The place we went turned out to be a bit snobbish, the kind of cafĂ© where you need to know the owner to get a table quickly. But the banana pancakes were good. It was twelve before we were headed to our car to go to the beach. When we were just walking around downtown, I had texted my mom to invite her to join us. She texted back “no” but then changed her mind thirty minutes later. I was already past Sheridan when Dashboard Confessional’s “Stolen” was stealing the dead air in the car. My mom was calling my cell phone to beg me to pick her up.

We did it. After all, the old lady tends to make outings a bit entertaining. So… an hour and a half AFTER that phone call, we were back on our way, on the road to Newport.

Ah… Daycation. I was glad that I had made a list of ideas, but I’m glad that we were flexible enough to not do most of the things on the list. There were just too many things to do. And it was daycation. We weren’t supposed to worry about anything. It was a day to relax. Wonderful…

I’m glad the daycation turned out well. Sure I ate too many calories and my quest walking adventure was vetoed, but I still had a good time. I took tons of pictures, got my Rogue ID card picture taken with Puddles the Duck, and got to hear sea lions bark at each other. Just another rad day on the Oregon Coast, yes?