In Which I Lose Everything on my Phone

So.

This is the story of how I don't back up anything on my iPhone (WHY YAYAN, WHY!!!?), and this morning as I attempted to upgrade to that Godforsaken, swear words new stupid dumb useless iOS6, my phone crashed and was sent into the black hole of "recovery mode" and I lost everything on my phone.

That would be almost 500 pictures, all my text messages ever, most of my new contacts (who knew iCloud had backed up my contacts a few months ago but NOT my photos?), all my settings, everything.

It made for a fantastic morning, during which I wept and swore and yelled at three different Apple Support people. Not that it was their fault. BUT my phone had completely stopped functioning and the situation got bad enough that the last guy said if he couldn't get my phone working, they'd send me a new one - for free. If that doesn't say dire situation, I don't know what does. Not that I really want a new phone, I just want MY OLD PHOTOS BACK. But at least my phone is functioning now, if you look at the silver lining.

Sob. Sigh.

In other news, the past few months have been great. The summer in Seattle is way more mild than Chicago...so much so that I complained about it being in the high 80s at one point. I can't say anything about the winter, since I haven't experienced it, but check back after it's been gray and rainy for 2 months and see how I'm doing.

I've been outdoor climbing, for the first time.

The harness does favors for NO ONE.

 It was interesting. Quite different from indoors, which is what I'm used to.

I've also been cultivating a new obsession with Legos. Nick got me the Hogwarts Lego set for my birthday, which I built in one night...

YES.

It's fine. I'm totally cool. Also what you see up there is about 1/8 of the size of the whole thing.

And we flew down to San Francisco for a wedding last weekend.

A lot of people live here.

Aside from being robbed blind taking the BART from the airport (a $7.00 surcharge for the airport on top of the price of the train ticket?! WHAT IS THAT?!), it was a lovely weekend of seeing friends, and the wedding was tons of fun.

And what has Bailey been up to? Oh, same old.

This is my toy.

GIVE ME THE TREAT.

She's just peachy. Sorry, I have no other cute pictures of her because - oh that's right - my phone lost them all. I'm not bitter.

So, the moral of this story is: back yo sh*t up. Or you'll regret it at some point. Also, I like Legos.

And I Moved to Seattle

Contrary to what may at this point be popular belief, I have not fallen off the face of the earth, nor am I dead. In the four-ish months between now and my last post, I have been busy moving my life from Chicago to Seattle, and now I'm living in Seattle (for a new job, in case you were wondering. I didn't just on a whim decide to move more than halfway across the country). After going through the ordeal of the move, I've decided that I'm never in my life moving again, so I guess I'm going to be in the Pacific Northwest for the rest of my life. Which is fine, if not solely for the fact that the temperature is high 60's here and consistently 90 in Chicago right now (except that I would really like to be tan now instead of pasty).

We had a moving company truck the majority of our stuff up here, but Nick and I drove some essentials ourselves the entire way with a pit stop in Fargo to see Nick's family (and PUPPIES!).

Katelyn and Mark's new(ish) puppy Dakota!

Crazy Badger - no really, he's crazy.

Huckleberry :)

And I don't really want to justify a picture for Benson because I didn't take any of him, because he was too busy cowering from Nick.

We stayed in Fargo for a few glorious days, and then began the trek to Seattle. Highlights along the way include:

North Dakota badlands.

Mountains - at this point I'm not sure in what state.

Somewhere in Washington - I think.

The entire road trip has blended together in my mind and I have no idea where anything is. The trip also included our poor four-door sedan hauling way too much stuff up and down mountains and really struggling, but I have no pictures of that because I was too busy sobbing with fear that the car was going to break down in the mountains of Montana where there was no cell phone service. But we're still alive, so it's cool.

We stayed in Montana for one night, which apparently Bailey was NOT okay with. We let her out of her crate when we got there because she had been in it for about 14 hours, but she made a beeline for under the bed, EVEN THOUGH it was boxed up underneath. She managed to find a slot between the slabs and nestled herself in a literally unreachable spot, and after ten terrifying minutes of thinking she'd escaped into the forest behind the hotel, Nick and I found where she was and ended up basically taking apart the bed to get her out. I have no pictures of that either, because I was too busy fuming. She spent the rest of the night in the bathroom. I'm not sorry.

We've basically been unpacking and walking places since we got here. We went hiking a couple weekends ago, which I feel was a very Seattle thing to do.

Hiking!

Nature.

And what has Bailey done since she's been here?

Please stop making noise.

It's naptime all the time.

Are these your legs? I'll sleep on them.

You woke me up.

She's also been actively trying to hunt the pigeons on our deck through the porch door. She just goes crazy at them even though they pay no attention to her, and unless she can pass through glass, she'll have to give up her dream of eating pigeons for meals.

Sneaky.

They are out there.

Off to not finish unpacking...

Happy President's Day

Oh wait...actually I had to go to work today. Totally lame. Things were pretty pleasant on my commute this morning and evening though, since the streets and trains were 50% less full than usual. I guess it would've been better if I didn't have to go to work at all, but...so it goes.

This has been going on outside my office building for about a month now:

There is no street.

The construction noise and all is annoying, but my biggest concern is the detour around the block I now have to take to get to Starbucks. So like, two extra blocks of walking really. I should really shut up now, since it's been quite good for my wallet, seeing as I no longer spend $4 every other day on coffee (why do I do that in the first place? Good question).

No one cares.

Bailey has been giving me attitude ever since I came home on Saturday smelling like dogs after volunteering at the Anti-Cruelty Society. She was literally furious, I'm talking puffed up tail and everything. But then I changed and she was fine. She's going to have to get used to it though...cause one day (SOON I HOPE) I'm getting a puppy. Yep, it's happening.

Yesterday I went to a Lululemon store for the first time, and it was just as magical as I imagined it would be. That being said, I wept for my bank account (I seriously need to work on the self-control), but now I've got a good stock of nice yoga clothes. You know, so I can NOT have good form while I do yoga, which is something I found out tonight about myself.

NOT STRAIGHT.

Headstands seriously scare the crap out of me, and it took me months to even be able to do it in the middle of the room and not next to the wall. However, I had no idea I was this far off from being straight. It's fine. Work in progress.

Not 90 degrees.

Okay, just blame this on my lack of ab strength. Again, work in progress. Don't worry about it.

What the crap is this?

Yogis everywhere, you can cringe at how terrible the form is here. It did take me, again, months to even be able to kick up into this, and I'm nowhere close to being able to not doing it against the wall, but seriously. This is slightly embarrassing.

Bailey does enjoy judging me, however.

Really I don't care much.

And with that, I'm off to sit on my couch for the rest of the night.

Lazy Sunday

I love Sundays when I do absolutely nothing aside from feed myself food from time to time. This makes me sound extremely lazy, but I am, so I'm fine with that.

Bailey spent the day lounging around in the sunlight (it's a rough life, haven't you heard?)

Here I am.

Notice me.

Have you noticed me?

Oh you did. Let me get pretty.

The one productive thing I did today was make a cake. I originally wanted to make a red velvet cake (for Valentine's Day, duh), but conveniently the grocery store here had zero bottles of red food coloring. So here you have it:

Alien velvet cake.

It's the best I could do. Happy Alien Valentine's Day.

It turned out all the same.

Can't even tell.

Kind of like Christmas.

The best thing about making your own cake is you can put as much frosting as you want on it. Sadly, I still didn't think there was enough frosting. 

More frosting next time.

Also, how are you supposed to keep the frosting from getting all crumby when you cut it? Do you have to let it sit in the fridge for, like, 20 minutes or something? I have no patience for that. So I've come to terms with crumby frosting. It's fine.

And since I didn't update last weekend, here are some highlights:

I made waffles.

Thanks to the $10 waffle iron I got on Black Friday.

I made bread.

And I finally got I Can't Believe It's Not Butter today to spread on homemade bread, because I finally felt bad enough about spreading slabs of pure butter on each and every piece. Me on my way to being healthy.

In other news...

I finished my training at the Anti-Cruelty Society yesterday, and I've already got three dogs on my list that I want to adopt. Actually, make that like eight. Or twelve. In any case. I walked a beagle mix yesterday who was absolutely adorable and decided to poop smack in the middle of the adoption waiting room while a couple of people were discussing adoption. It was a fine moment (and yes, I cleaned it up).

I got a shirt, so it's official.

So in summary, it is now my job to play with puppies. Expect pictures in the near future.

I'm Back

So sometimes this thing happens during the winter here. I go into hibernation mode, and the only thing I can do is drag myself to work in the morning, drag myself back to my apartment in the evening, and sit on my couch and do absolutely nothing until I go to bed.

True, I tend to do that not just during winter, but winter is especially bad. It's freezing, it gets dark at 3pm so by the time I get home it feels like 10pm, it's hard to walk because apparently 80% of the neighborhood doesn't believe in shoveling their sidewalks, and sitting under a blanket doing nothing is just about the best thing in the world.

Thus, my almost-two-month hiatus from doing anything productive outside of the time I spend at work. It happens.

Since I've been out of touch for so long, here's a five-second summary of the highlights this past winter (did you hear that, Chicago? This past winter - don't make this warm weather a tease, I told you winter is over). Don't worry, it's not long, because like I said, I pretty much did nothing. So here we go.

I ate cake. Are you surprised?

Yum.

Bailey wanted some.

You're sharing, right? You always share.

I decorated sugar cookies with Katie when she was in town, something that happens on average once a year.

Owls, because they're cool.

And then I ate them.

I made homemade bagels! TWICE. Probably the most productive thing I did in the past two months.

These are good.

I made bread! I wish this was as impressive as the bagels, but honestly this was quite easy with this book.

And then I ate the bagels and bread while sitting on my couch watching TV.

Bailey wanted some.

Just a crumb?

Bailey was grumpy.

It's 7am on Saturday. Why haven't you fed me?

She also passed out multiple nights right on my legs, despite the fact she had almost an entire queen-sized bed to sleep on.

I hope you didn't want to move anytime soon.

And that's pretty much it.

Oh, and I did some yoga. Lots of yoga, actually. In fact, yoga is probably the sole reason I'm not 50 pounds overweight right now. But I don't have a picture of me doing it, since it's hard to get a picture of that, so you'll just have to take my word for it. You don't have to, though. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me. I'm also developing an obsession with all things Lululemon, and they had a warehouse sale in Chicago recently, so you can definitely believe that I went to that and immediately afterwards wept for the state of my bank account. Totally worth it. I've decided to allow myself one Lululemon item per credit card bill, so I can slowly accumulate things without feeling massive amounts of guilt since they're quite pricey (again...totally worth it). So really, I was just making up for lost time at the warehouse sale.

And so there you have it, a summary of what my life was like during possibly the most depressing time of the year (after the holidays, and still cold). I'm getting pretty excited for some things coming up though...mainly, I finally got accepted as a volunteer at The Anti-Cruelty Society and I have my training with the Dog Care program next Saturday, so I will totally be getting my puppy fix there.

I also signed up for a February fitness challenge at my yoga studio, because that's definitely something I could use. So take that, Chicago. Bring on the cold.

No actually, please don't. Please stay warm and get warmer.