A Week in Photos: Week 9

I promise I will be working on a full post for this week. I love my week in photos, but I do have something that I am working on that I'm really looking forward to sharing for the first time. I promise this blog is going to be more substance than just pretty pictures of my life!! For the time being though, enjoy the sparkly things :)

 Sunday 2/24: Both Ryan and I work at KLEAN, a drug and alcohol treatment center in Long Beach, WA. It's a small community where health care providers have to work together and support each other. A group of KLEAN employees attended a fund raiser and auction for the Ocean Beach Hospital in Long Beach. It was a Mardi Gras themed event which all of us had a blast and Ryan even took home a silent raffle item!

Monday 2/25: Sometimes our kitties allow for very sweet moments that I have to capture on camera. Seeing my two boys in a frame together is the best. Marley isn't much of a snuggler and as you can see here, he's pulling away pretty quick, but he wasn't fast enough to avoid this picture!

Tuesday 2/26: Monday and Tuesday I got a nasty head cold. I spent those two days reading and resting. I finished two books in two days, The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigani and Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta, both of which were AMAZING! The copy of Saving Francesca I had was from Bookmooch, so I figured I would pay a good book forward. A first happened for me, someone mooched a book from me from another country! I shipped a book off to Slovenia, fingers crossed it get's there safely and in good condition!

Wednesday 2/27: A milestone birthday in early recovery is your 18 month mark. It's something that I'm pretty proud of and something that has mobilized me into action. I've asked someone to start working the steps with me which I have put off for long enough now. To celebrate, my lovely boyfriend set in motion getting me a cake and getting my co-workers to gather the clients together to sing me happy birthday. It was a wonderful day!

Thursday 2/28: For "Throwback Thursday" this week, I wanted to post a scenery shot since it's been a while. I think Astoria is one of the most interesting places to live, you can always find something beautiful if you are looking for it. Sometime last year, my dad came down for a weekend visit, and it just so happened a fleet of pirate ships were in town. The Hawaiian Chieftain, the Lady Washington and a ship from the Royal Canadian Navy were making a tour of the West Coast ports. The bight colors and the many masts are truly awe-inspiring up close.

 Thursday 2/28: There is a site that the men of my workplace love. It's called The Chive. It's a compilation site of pictures, stories and videos of things in life that are ironic, satirical and funny. There's a whole cult following of people that say things like, "Keep Calm, Chive On", "KCCO", so on and so forth. For a while now, Ryan and my good friend Vern have been trying to get some Chive swag. They have a huge section of shirts and other things that are all Chive related, that are all literally the most difficult things on earth to purchase. Whoever is doing their merchandising is definitely using the tenet of supply and demand, seeing as how NOTHING IS EVER IN STOCK. There is now a black market on eBay for Chive goods where shirts are going for almost triple the original asking price. I think I have made it my life mission now to acquire some of their goods seeing as how it's so damn hard, it's like they are personally challenging me. The one time before this that I even came close to acquiring anything they produce, their server crashed as I was trying to check out because so many people were on their site trying to do the same thing. It was a maddening experience. This time though, when the email notification of something being in stock sailed into my inbox, I dropped anything I was doing and figuratively sprinted over to the site. I was almost in like a shopping blackout as I quickly added items to my cart and checked out in a matter of 30 seconds. I'll tell you, this was one of the most stressful 5 minutes of my recent life. My pulse was racing, I had the cold sweats, my hands were clammy, it was an unreal experience. But, I came, I saw, I conquered. I was able to secure two Chive shirts for the two men in my life. Erin 1, The Chive 0.

Friday 3/1: I know I take a lot of pictures of my cats. I know I probably talk about them too much in real life also. I think I have a complex where I actually think they are real people. Like their personalities and actions make me think of them as my good friends. I realize this places me in the category of "Crazy Cat Lady", but that's a title I will accept with pride. I would caption this photo, "Like A Boss", Peanut looks very Don Corleone-esque here and I love it. Our cats are like moths to flame with the gas fireplace we have, this is a common affair. I just so happened to walk out of the kitchen to find her in this position, lounging in the heat.

 Saturday 3/2: Our new Saturday routine has become going to Long Beach to catch the AA community dinner we host at KLEAN, followed by the weekly speaker meeting. We're doing it as a way to bring the AA community into the treatment center and get them involved with what we're doing, as well as allowing the clients to hear the stories of men and women who have firmly planted their lives in the roots of AA, in hopes that the clients might hear something that saves their lives. When I was in treatment, this was one of my favorite meetings to go to, I love hearing the experience, strength and hope of others, it reconfirmed for me that a) I am an alcoholic just like them and b) that I was in the right place. This week we rode over with our good friend Brandon and a new sponsee of Ryan's. We had about an hour to kill before the dinner, so we headed to the beach to fly some kites Brandon had in the back of his rig. It was an amazingly random hour of kite flying and good weather, I was able to snap this pic right about sunset. We all had a blast.

Saturday 3/2: This is another photo I captured while at the beach. The guys were busy flying kites, I was busy finding the good shots. I don't know when I became so obsessed with documenting my life, maybe after all the years of blacking out and forgetting. A long line of having no memories can be really disheartening. I guess that's why I'm doing this blog, to remember where I've been years from now so I can look back and get a snap shot of what I was doing and how I was feeling. In this picture I loved the way the light was bouncing off the water as the tide was coming in, this is also to show that I was most inappropriately dressed for an outdoor occasion such as this.