I had a truly crazy weekend and I’m still a little weak in the knees from it all.  A good chunk of the limping though is from getting kicked by a gal in sharp heels at the Century Ballroom on Sunday night.  Swing is definitely a contact sport, and Lindy Hop is no exception.  As much as I love swing though, I’m pleasantly shocked to say it got majorly trumped by The Seattle Anti-Freeze this weekend: I’m sure you’ve heard of pub crawls, but we did a pub run.  An epic 8k pub run to seven bars with a ton of people.  Epic.

Things are going really well with the Big Brothers Big Sisters volunteering.  My “Little” is really fun to hang out with, she’s very smart and full of energy.  It’s also encouraging me to go on some fun little adventures.  For example, on Saturday we’re helping to restore a creek in Juanita while learning about the environment.

Also, on a bit of an overdue whim I’ve decided that over Independence Day I’ll be headed to hot, hot Arizona to visit my dear friend Connie. That’s fewer than two weeks away! It will be great just to have some quality one on one time like the good old days, but as a bonus we also have some fun plans: we’re going to the July 4th Tempe Town Festival, and then we’re going camping in the Grand Canyon. Camping in the Grand Canyon - how awesome is that?   Pretty awesome.  I am super excited for camping with Connie. I miss her.

Because it’s two hours from Seattle and twenty degrees hotter than Seattle was when you left. Because you drive down the street and see ginormous dot-com king companies lining the street, one after another. Because the party you throw in Atheron gets on ValleyWag. Because of all the good memories there.

But most of all, because stuff like this can be found on the street and end up in your Flickr friend’s photostream:

If can haz
Originally uploaded by Jamison

Sidenote:  I’m traveling right now, but in Spokane, Washington, not in the valley.  Just being in the hotel room here kind of reminded me of my last trip to San Francisco.  I’ll be back in Seattle on Saturday evening.

Wow… I had a simply amazing weekend. Usually I don’t like to write “here’s everything I did” type posts, but this deserves some documentation. Friday night, I hit up a bit of Camp Jitterbug (billed as “The Awesomest Lindy Hop Event Ever!”) for some swing dancing with my friend Shane - they had the first heat of the Jack & Jill Lindy Hop contest, which was so much fun to watch, plus plenty of room to dance in as it was at the UW Hub Ballroom.

Saturday morning I sort of randomly went canoeing with Kevin, a fellow BrightKite beta user who I ran into last week at Indy. I had a great time and have never seen more turtles, check this out:

Crazy, eh? I love exploring the area via canoe, in fact I think the highlight of our morning paddling adventure was attempting to find a way through the reeds. It was pretty hilarious, especially when the going got tough and we nearly tried walking across some not-so-stable marshy “land” that turned out to be not so much “land” as a floating mass of vegetation.

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Canoeing offers a peaceful respite from the stress of modern life, and if you’re living in Seattle, it’s a quick wilderness experience in the middle of the city. At the UW Waterfront Activities Center you can easily rent boats for an hour or two, at $7.50 per hour per boat it is cheaper than seeing a movie.

Here’s a video of last Sunday’s canoeing adventure with my friend Micah:

(Can’t see embedded video? Watch it on Flickr.)

I generally paddle over to the Washington Park Arboretum across the ship canal. Washington Park is a beautiful, uniquely synergistic partnership of the very urban and the very wild: the concrete limbs of 520 intertwine with marshes, reeds, and small plots of land home to interesting animals to observe and photograph (watch for Great Blue Herons and Bald Eagles). The season and weather severely change the foliage and atmosphere, so you always get a different experience. This is compounded by the fact that you can of course bring as many people as you’d like, making it as solitary or social as you’d like. Canoeing suits every mood, as long as you enjoy being outside: I find sometimes when I go I prefer to drift along and relax, just listening to the birds sing, and other times I like to push myself to put all I can into aggressive paddling and race other boats. This is another one of those sneaky workouts that’s cleverly disguised as fun. :-)

I’ve been canoeing pretty frequently lately, especially on the weekends. If you’re interested in joining, text “follow firewallender” to 40404 to follow me on Twitter* for impromptu invitations to paddle.

I really enjoy looking at the bright side of life. I mean, you only get one life, might as well accentuate the positive and learn from the negative, then move past it. So I thought it would be nice to do a series of blog posts on things I love, and why they are so awesome. Mostly, so I can look back with fondness at these things, but also in hopes that I might inspire friends to try out some of my favourites. So, let’s get started. Since I just went, let’s chat for a moment about swing dancing.

Fist, an unordered list of random things I enjoy:

• Hanging out with good friends
• Meeting new people
• Exercise that’s cleverly disguised as fun
• Big band music from the 30s and 40s
• Being goofy and silly and people finding that cool
• Feeling like a rockstar, if only for one song
• Figuring something new out and then perfecting it
• Covering up the “oh-no-tomorrow-is-Monday” dread

Add all these things together, mix thoroughly, and *BAM!* you have swing dancing. How much do I love dancing? Well, I bicycled about ten miles on Friday, hiked almost as many miles on Saturday, and went canoing on Sunday - my body was basically ready to mutiny on me, but I just couldn’t stay away from dancing at the Century Ballroom tonight. Even when my legs are ready to fall off, I start swing dancing and forget it all, I could dance for hours.

Another bonus: it’s physically impossible to be sad while swing dancing or even shortly thereafter. At least, that is, until you accidentally drive over a little white mouse on Denny Avenue on the way home. Oh, that made me so, so bummed.

But I digress - dancing is awesome. One of the things I love is that the crew that I go with is equally enthralled with dancing and we’re always trying to figure out new and interesting looking moves. We’ll work on a technique until we nail it, and then integrate it into our dance “vocabulary” for the future. We’re all getting better together. We also usually have an even ratio of gals to guys, meaning we all get to dance every song, and everyone has their own style. Tonight we even did a bit of a “do-si-do” during which the whole group of us would simultaneously change partners several times during one song. It was a blast. We took some great shots tonight, once the guys upload them I’ll be sure to add to this post.

I think it goes without saying (but people always follow up that phrase by stating the obvious, and who am I to break societal norms?) that I highly recommend swing dancing. Special emphasis on the Lindy Hop, which is like all the awesomeness of swing dancing plus the coolness of ten ninjas. If you’d like to give it a go, I’d recommend just running a Google search for “swing dance” plus the name of your town and you’re likely to come up with a lot of options (assuming you live in someplace mildly entertaining). Swing has a huge following all over the United States.

The Century Ballroom, Seattle

As per my doctor’s orders, it’s past my laptop’s bedtime. But, my laptop just got an upgrade to Leopard today, so it was out of commission for a bit. I’ll give it, or rather me, some slack.

I had what should be by all accounts a great day. I’m still feeling rather low though. I’ve been fighting off depression (which feeds my insomnia… or vice-versa?) for the past couple of months. It’s a strange dichotomy, because I’ve been more active lately, so in some ways I’m at the healthiest point I’ve been in a long time, but in other ways I’m at a very low point. Suffice to say, I’ve been pushing myself to stay active, for better or worse. I’m going to focus on the better in this post to cheer myself up.

Many good times have been had due to said pushing. I can’t believe how quickly time’s been flying lately. A few highlights from this week:

The Skillbit Startup Wake at McLeod Residence

Emerald City Comicon, namely, chatting with the glorious Mr. Wil Wheaton

Scott, Mike, and Max’s Birthday Party in Ballard (and my first Flaming Dr. Pepper)

Mother’s Day at the Seattle Art Museum with my lovable family

And at iLike, Dierks Bentley, country music star and all around nice guy

I wish I had some shots of my bike rides to add - they’ve been lovely. All in all, a lot of crazy fun going on at work and outside of work. And tomorrow starts a whole ‘nother weekend. I figure I might be the luckiest girl in the world, so I need to snap out of this feeling sad rubbish. Ah, if only my head and heart would get on the same page.

I’ve been waiting for this since I was 7. Well, the last Indiana Jones movie was in 1989, though I’m not sure I was actually aware of Indiana Jones at that point. In any case, the world has been waiting for Indiana Jones IV since 1989, and now, tickets are finally on sale. Yes, they just went on sale.

If you want to see the opening show, stop reading this now and GO GO GO BUY TICKETS. Make sure it’s the opening show: Wednesday, May 21st at 11:59pm. You can use my Movie Watcher membership number to save a dollar if you don’t have your own (#256930041). Then add yourself to the event on Facebook, just for fun.

Now, a word to the hardcore: when it comes to getting a good seat, try to get there right before the after-work rush if you can. This is serious business. :-) There are 808 seats in the Seattle Cinerama, so expect a big line. Not that, er, I’ve done anything like this before.

Star Wars line, Cinerama, Seattle, WA
Originally uploaded by djwudi

I have blogged on LiveJournal since January 26th, 2002 and have made over two thousand entries and both posted and received nearly ten thousand comments each. I’m very fond of LiveJournal. That being said, I’d like to move my data into my own control, and six plus years is, in the information age, an eternity.

So I’m moving on. I have many friends in the LiveJournal community still, so I’ll be using the LiveJournal Crossposter to continue posting on my old blog while simultaneously blogging here (special thanks to badlydrawnjeff for pointing out this WordPress plugin, and also thanks to the LJ user ex plugin for allowing me to properly link LJ users). You can comment in either place, I’ll be notified either way. But Firewallender.com is the real enchilada.

If you are looking for entries previous to today’s date, May 6th, 2008, please look at my old blog archives at LiveJournal. I’ll eventually be backing them up here or elsewhere, but for now that’s the best place to access them.

Thanks for reading! First person to comment on my new Firewallender.com blog gets a cookie. :-)