Today I went no further than a half-mile from my house, and it was nice. After last weekend’s running around it was good to just anchor down a bit.
Since Kelly had class all day, I had intended to sleep in late, but by 9am I got up and decided to have a full day. I fixed myself some coffee, had some cereal, and then spent some quality time with my new toy (the MacBook Pro). After a couple hours playing / tinkering / learning (and paying bills online, urgh) I set out to do some yardwork. This was at around 11am. Just as I was about to go outside, it started pouring down rain. Oh well, more play time! About an hour later the sun emerged again, so I got all ready to get outside and… rain again. Hrm. Ok, more geeking out. Finally, at around 2pm I decided I needed to do something productive, so I did a bit of grocery shopping at the local grocery store. After getting home and looking at the ominous clouds I decided not to bother going out and mowing my lawn, and instead decided to wash the car. This may sound foolhardy, but think about it… the rain helps wash the soap off! 🙂 However, I got the car washed, dried, and into the garage before any further showers. Kelly got back from class shortly after I finished washing the car, but needed some ‘decompress’ time, so I decided to detail the car pretty heavily (vacuum, wiped down all the vinyl & plastics, cleaned the windows inside and out, etc). After about three and a half hours of all that car cleaning nonsense (resulting in a super clean car) I got cleaned up and Kelly and I went out for some dinner.
We decided to walk to the Concordia Ale House (still within the half-mile range mentioned above), which we hadn’t been to in quite a while. I was very happy to see they were pouring the Terminal Gravity ESG (Extra-Special Golden), a delicious, light, summer-y golden ale. I also had a pint of Hales ‘Dublin Stout’, which was really good (creamy, not overly strong or bitter, somewhat remarkable for a Northwest stout). We also had some really good food… I had a turkey melt (with jack cheese and bacon, mmm), and Kelly had a tomato, pesto, cheese sandwich. We both had a nice relaxing time out, and then walked home. Good day. Feeling refreshed, though a little sore. Surprising what 3+ hours of car cleaning will do. 🙂
Tonight we had one heck of a lightning show! I hadn’t seen any forecasts of the storm so it was a bit of a surprise to see the dark clouds roll in and the flashes of light in the distance. Many of the strikes were directly overhead, leaving us with some house-shaking thunder. The show lasted for a lot longer than most seem to around here. Somewhere around 2 hours. Early on I’d grabbed my camera and started taking both still photos and some videos. The photo to the left is the one decent one I captured from the still shots. The video turned up some more, but I never managed to get a photo of the really impressive ones, and there were quite a few.