Please note that I will forgive you for skipping over the text and just looking at the pictures. I needed a place to document my trip so that I could avoid annoying my friends with the details in person.

Kevin and I took a trip to Seattle and Portland because the flights cost about $7 total (I had miles), I have family and a friend in Seattle, and I love Portland and wanted to share the joy with Kevin. Most importantly, there is a sandwich place in Portland (East Side Deli) that elevates me to new levels of happiness.

First we almost missed our flight because we arrived two minutes after the checked baggage cutoff time we didn’t know existed. The American Airlines lady slowly lost her mind in front of us and kept saying “It’s too late. It’s too late.” while I typed her name into my phone to complain about her later. She told us we would have to wait until the next day to fly standby. Somehow she got her shit together and told us we could make our flight but we would have to run. She ran with us to the security line, helped us cut the entire line, and then we waved goodbye and yelled thank-yous to her as she told us repeatedly that we had to run. JFK is a huge airport but our sweaty bodies made it on that plane. I submitted a demand to AA website that the employee be formally recognized and rewarded for helping us make our flight and I may resort to nonstop tweeting at @AmericanAir until she gets a bonus. I got your back, Angela Laforia, you goddess of an airline employee.

After experiencing the kind of crushing boredom you only find on an airplane and in the depths of hell, we finally made it to Seattle. I reserved a compact car at the rental place but they only had a minivan available in that price range…so we upgraded to a Mustang, the ultimate off-road vehicle.

I was terrified of freezing and/or starving to death during our planned one-night camping trip so we took a trip to the enormous REI for some freeze-dried food and sexy long johns. Somehow the nation’s oldest REI employee convinced us to get memberships and now I’m kind of in love with the company.

We then visited my lovely aunt, uncle, and cousins in Bellevue and had dinner there. I had to document how much attitude my cousin Sasha has. No one told him to pose like a pensive Backstreet Boy, and yet here he is.

We then Skyped with my grandparents in Russia and it was weird.

The next day we we were off to Portland, which I’ve been to a couple of times before. I used Airbnb for the first time and was pretty pleased with the experience. Our host left us alone and had the sweetest dog that I planned to steal but then forgot to.

Here’s a pornographic photo of my trout. This was maybe the second time in my life I managed to take a picture of food before eating part of it.

Instead we made the incredibly depressing  drive back through the destruction and took the longer route to Ozette Lake using real roads this time. We then hiked through some rain forest to get to Cape Alava. Kevin looked like this:

And also this:

When we finally got to Cape Alava, it was stunning.

We picked the furthest campsite from the trail and started setting up our hammocks while it was still light outside. We lovingly call them bear tacos because of my constant fear of a bear coming along as I sleep and eating me like the sack of food that I am to that beast. Kevin and I each bought a hammock because sleeping separately is super romantic.

Now before you get your panties in a bunch about book burning, I must tell you that it was only The Hunger Games and not my heavily annotated copy of the Talmud.* And anyway, we only burned the first 90 pages because I hadn’t read the rest yet. My desperate attempt to save us from darkness and starvation didn’t work. I ended up pouring lukewarm water onto the pasta primavera and eating crunchy pasta all by myself.

Things we saw:

A fox walking out onto the beach just to take a dump.

A sea lion carcass that I convinced myself was the skeleton of a person that had died or been killed there. A person with a flipper.

Crazy seaweed:

Cute purple crabs:

Sometimes Kevin makes me regret introducing him to rock climbing because now no vertical surface is safe. These kinds of rock formations were all along the beach. Some had petroglyphs that are hundreds of years old. We didn’t really care about them as much as the nerdy park ranger who told us about them.

We also saw a bald eagle that I didn’t photograph because birds aren’t cute.

I don’t know how to end this so…

THE END.

* This doesn’t exist.

My boss messaged me about a month ago as he was editing one of my reports to tell me that he had “completed the most complex formatting feat of all time” in Microsoft Word, as he probably felt his talents were going unnoticed.

Naturally, I then e-mailed most of the people that report to him (subject line: “best idea ever”) and got them all to pitch in for a giant custom trophy in recognition of his feat. Yes, that is a golden computer on top.

Many of you may not realize that I’m half Asian. My mother was born east of the Urals, so that’s that. Anyway, here is some daikon kimchi and bibimbap I made right before I dropped the bento box like an idiot.

I had to bring something ball shaped to a Super Bowl party. Brigadeiros = sweetened condensed milk + cocoa + butter + lots of stirring. I rolled them in granulated sugar, pecans, and toasted coconut.

Adding to the list of things I can blame on Skyrim, Kevin convinced me to help him make mead tonight. We watched a few videos and then mostly relied on this recipe: http://www.stormthecastle.com/mead/fast-cheap-mead-making.htm. It was one of the few recipes that made it sound okay to use regular active dry yeast. Otherwise we would have had to order special mead/wine yeast online, and our mead-making needs were too urgent for that.

The most annoying but necessary part of the whole process was sanitizing all of the equipment with bleach. Apparently the guideline is 1 tablespoon of bleach per gallon of water, but who can keep track and since when did bleach ever hurt anybody? We used a glass carboy (new word!) and a giant bucket, so the bath tub had to get involved.

We started by mixing together about 1.5 gallons of spring water, 4.5 pounds of honey, one sliced orange, and some orange peels.

We added about 50 disgusting raisins* and then finally a half an ounce of active dry yeast that I first activated in warm water. The final amount of liquid was about 2 gallons. 

After everything was combined, it had to be mixed pretty aggressively for aeration. This is definitely Kevin’s hand.

Once we mixed everything, we had to transfer it to a glass carboy with an airlock (or fermentation lock) that would allow the carbon dioxide to be released.

The transfer was taking so long that I could feel myself aging, so we got crafty with a nearby basket to avoid holding the carboy up the whole time.

We put some vodka in the airlock to prevent contamination (or something) and then placed the mead in its rightful place in the living room. 

After about two weeks we’ll need to transfer the mead to smaller jugs and then let it sit and develop flavor over the course of several months. Right now it’s just blooping as bubbles are being produced, which will be fun to listen to until it starts driving us insane.

The whole process has been fun so far but I’m going to be devastated if I wait six months and end up with yeasty honey water. I’ll also be pretty upset if I poison my friends with it, but I’ll cross that manslaughter bridge when I get there. I’ll keep you posted.

*As some of you may already know, raisins are my arch-nemeses, as they ruin the flavor and texture of many things I love to eat. However, the recipe was very serious about including raisins to feed the yeast, so I gave in.