Outside of work I’ve been—well working out. I joined the Eureka Adorni Center, which is the local recreation center. For $27 a month – yes Eric and I joined with a family membership—I can lift weights, play basketball OR kickbox with old women. You can guess what I’ve been doing. Cardio kickboxing involves jabbing (I’m not too bad), quasi drill team like dancing (I’m absolutely horrible) and of course kicking (in my case not very high). The bright side is that everyone else is over 40 and so by default I’m not the worst one. It’s pretty hilarious to watch myself in the aerobic room mirrors as I attempt to kick forward left right and back all in a five second period. The instructor is right out of the 80’s with bright red, tightly curled long locks. Her spirit could only be described as spunky. I was recently perusing the class list and realized she teaches 80% of all the classes. So that’s at least 5 hours of fitness a day. She must eat a lot of carbohydrates. We finally got some of the other Americorps kids to play basketball with us. So last week Eric and I played two-on-two with Brian and Kika. Eric happens to be 6’3 so basically he killed us. We had to resort to dirty tactics like pantsing and illegal hip checks under the basket just to stay in the game (and this was after Brian, Kika and I all joined up on one team against Eric). If you ever want to win a basketball game you’d better be on Eric Matthew Miller from Wisconsin’s team (see photo above).I’ve also been looking for extra work in Eureka to supplement my below minimum wage income. So far that has been a horrible stint of house-sitting for this woman that I work with. She has three small dogs—two Chihuahuas and one miniature poodle. In the week I was there, one of the dogs never came out from under the upstairs bed and all three of them chose to pee in the house instead of outside. Well people say that babysitting is better than abstinence education; I would argue dog sitting does the same thing for detouring potential pet owners. Needless to say I will not be adopting a dog any time soon. My other idea for work was to be the bouncer at the gay bar in Eureka. This was more of an impulsive idea I had when I went to a really bad show there last week but can’t you just picture me in a cutoff shirt throwing people out to the curb? Don’t worry this probably just a pipe dream.
This past weekend was a five day one for me because we got Lincoln/Darwin’s Birthday and President’s Day off. I took that opportunity to travel up to see Ben Robinson. A fellow Vista was driving from Eureka to Portland so I hitched a 7.5 hour ride up and then took a 4 hour bus up to Seattle. I think I’m addicted to ridiculous traveling and it felt good to get out of Humboldt County for the weekend. Ben just got a job with Habitat for Humanity of East King County and so I spent a day out on site putting in insulation into a unit they have been building. When I was in Seattle in October I also helped build on the same house (Ben’s girlfriend also works for Habitat). In that short amount of time the housing units looked complete different as so much work had been done. It grilled Ben’s supervisors about the energy efficiency measures that would be going into the homes. I was surprised when they named off quite a few things they were doing. They have actually recruited a Vista to research green building techniques to make the houses they build even better. The one big thing they haven’t done is switch over to cellulose installation. So instead we were dealing with pallets of itchy fiberglass. A family of three was in my volunteer group (who we found out later use to run with the Diebels family from Juneau) along with Ben and Susannah. As the three of them worked upstairs; Ben, Suz and I finished insulating the garage. With masks on our faces and big jackets covering our clothes, Ben and I yelled measurements from atop our ladders and Susannah cut pieces to meet our specifications. Then we stuffed the pieces in between beams in the ceiling, maintaining the fluff of the fiberglass. A hard day’s work. Saturday being Valentines Day, after building we were invited to a formal V-day themed pub crawl. Of course I threw in a little Juneau style and wore my extra tuff boots. Ben wore a sweater that he got at a thrift store that had bits of bronze, gold, silver and black. In fact, it was even a woman’s sweater. The crawl started on the top floor of one of the bigger sky scrapers in downtown Seattle. The actual bar wasn’t that great but the view from the top was beautiful. Lights glistened and street lights lit up tiny specks of cars passing underneath. After finishing our ‘Prison Tattoos’, a horrible drink that was some mixture of Southern Comfort and whiskey, we headed to the next place: Rock Bottom Brewery. I’m on a mission to eventually sample every single brewery in the Pacific Northwest so I was excited to check another one off the list. I had the Brown Bear Brown Ale and it was delicious. Then we were off to Elephant and Castle, which Tom Robbins referenced in Skinny Legs and All. We had so much fun at the first three bars we didn’t make it to the fourth one until after last call but we considered the crawl a success and no one ended up having to actually crawl between the bars so it was even better.
