Washington: Mukilteo Ferry, Ivar's Seafood by the pier

After leisurely meandering through the Mukilteo Lighthouse Park for a while and enjoying the stunning scenery and people (and pup) watching, we had to acknowledge our rapidly growing hunger growling in our bellies before it evolved into either of us being outright hangry! Luckily for us, within a short few minutes walk of the Lighthouse Park is an Ivar's restaurant and takeaway window, where you can load up on fresh-from-the-ocean goodies cooked up hot and fresh for you! They also offer root beer floats, so whether you're looking to cool off in the warmer summer months or simply an excitable fan of root beer and ice cream paired in a drinking vessel, that's a nice surprise. Antho, of course, had to have one. Not gonna lie, it was pretty damn good, too. I'm more of a savory person, so I was super excited about my fried oysters- and let me tell you guys, I was not disappointed. I can eat oysters in any form, whether it's fresh off the half shell or battered and deep fried, and Ivar's were super juicy and ultra-fresh, and a damn fine bit of fried oysters. 

Antho opted for some of the fried cod, and he was quite pleased with his choice, too. I snagged a bite or two of his fish and it was so juicy the liquid gushed down my hand, which I take as a good sign. Maybe be wary if you're not a fan of wearing your food, or smelling like your fish dinner later, but we weren't complaining one bit. We found a comfortable place to sit away from the minimal crowds, where we could listen to the gentle lapping of the waves as they rhythmically beat against the pier. Gulls stood their ever-vigilant watch as we ate, hoping for a snack. Even though the food was SO good, we couldn't help but toss out a fry or two as an offering to our feathered friends. There was even a large jellyfish who drifted (swam? floated?) by, offering us plenty of opportunities to photograph their undulating advances.  When we finished eating, we wandered a little further down the path, finding a little cove where we could take in the sunset and coincidentally find ourselves surprised by a suddenly rapid-rise of the tides. We escaped to high ground in time, and caught a ferry returning to the dock to disembark the passengers, which was fun to see from a new vantage point.

 Overall we had a blast, and we're excited to see where we end up next!

Washington: Mukilteo Lighthouse Park

Mukilteo, a hard (for us) to pronounce but lovely community North of Seattle, is home to a gorgeous beachfront park and a busy ferry route. During one of our free afternoons of exploration, we decided to head up North and see what all the fuss was about! We're glad we went for it, as we had an absolutely lovely time strolling through the park and taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the area. Well, more smells for Antho than there were for me, given that my sniffer is pretty weak and bordering on full-on anosmia, but I digress. As the sun began to slowly lower itself in the sky, we were able to enjoy the brisk air and beautiful light for a good while. The weather being as it is up here, meaning a strong tending towards grey, drizzly days for an extensive portion of the year, we were not alone in our appreciation of a somewhat rare nice day. I'm not complaining about the company, though, as we were able to see a few super cute pooches and proto-humans galavanting about, which always makes our hearts warm. There were couples having a romantic picnic, families lounging on blankets or gathering around a particularly comfortable piece of driftwood, and the casual neighbors out walking their pups. While part of the park was closed on the day of our visit due to a wedding, we couldn't even be grumpy about that because there were still so many other things to enjoy! From the open, expansive grassy fields where people and their pups were happily playing, to the beachfront views offering unhindered sunset scenes and ferry-viewing, to the paved walkways leading to the nearby piers. Antho and I both thoroughly enjoyed our visit, and I look forward to the next trip so we can check out the lighthouse close-up! Unless, of course, there's another wedding, in which case we'll wander elsewhere!

These days, we're both gainfully employed and don't find as much free time available to go out and explore. Even so, it's awesome having so many options available to us here! Not only does Seattle proper have an outstanding number of parks, but each neighborhood, each suburb, has its own public spaces worth exploring. I'm so excited for the upcoming spring and summer months! There's always going to be an adjustment period where money and time feel tight when you move to a new place, but we both have secured jobs with room to grow and advance along with benefits and decent pay. In time, we should be able to breathe a little easier and make more time for exploration again. 

My 2018 Playlist

2018 has been one hell of a year, hasn't it? Antho and I packed our vehicles up and drove from the bottom Southwest corner of the state of Nevada all the way up to the northern corner of Washington state, a trek that took us the better part of three days and covered over 1,200 miles! There was that stop in Merril, Oregon, where I thought my transmission finally clunked out on me only to discover she was just dehydrated... Before that, there was that bright, cold morning in Reno, Nevada, where we awoke to find wild horses grazing not far from our temporary campsite. We took a side trek out to Mesquite, also in Nevada, during the spring so I could draw a graduating class of high school seniors, and then the extended journey out to St George...  We saw goats, and Gila monsters, lions and tigers and dolphins! There were photoshoots at Valley of Fire, Mount Charleston, and at home! We went to the China Lights Festival and the Intergalactic Art Car show, among many other things! Like I said, it's been one hell of a year.

There were some real ups and downs along the way too, but that's the nature of life. So it goes. One thing that remains consistent is the need for music, to help power us through. You can't spend three full days driving without something to listen to, right?! While I'm generally more than happy to listen to endless hours of the Mysterious Universe podcast, to get my fix of paranormal stories and Aussie sass, I have to admit that it was a great gift when Antho upgraded us to the Spotify Premium family plan. This is NOT a sponsored post- I just really appreciate how much Spotify has helped open up my listening experience. I'm definitely one of those people who can fall into a hard rut with music, listening to the same 5 songs for weeks until I burn myself out so utterly and completely that I force myself to forget the song exists until I end up stumbling upon it sometime later in a playlist, like the handy one Spotify compiled for me of my top 100 songs of 2018. I used to gather all my favorite songs via music video into a playlist on Youtube, which I'd let play in a background window, but that's growing to be more challenging as Youtube pushes their pay-to-play services more and more. It's a lot of fun to look back and see (or rather, hear) what songs dominated my year. A lot of K-pop is present as I'm still nursing the comedown from living in South Korea and being immersed in it daily... also, K-pop (and J-pop) is definitely a guilty pleasure of mine. If I'm having a tough day, it's safe to say that a peppy girl group (or smooth boy band) will perk me right back up. A lot of these songs helped get me through long, slow nights working in the jewelry shop at Harrah's and withstanding profuse rejections from potential customers. Retail sales is a tough gig to be in for me, and it was the job I held throughout the vast majority of the year... I mean, I'm not a hideous specimen of a human, and I can be some measure of charming when I wish to be, but I have a hard time trying to pressure people into buying things that I know they don't really need at prices I personally wouldn't want to pay... I've made comics about this before, man!

But now, here in Seattle, I've found a gig that suits me a lot more on a philosophic and personal level. I'm not going to delve into too many details about it, but suffice it to say I've found a company and form of work that aligns much more closely with my personal values. They're eco-friendly, have pet chickens (and kittens) at the company office, provide acupuncture and yoga classes for their staff, and are flexible enough to allow me time off for a caricature gig when it arises while also paying a living wage. Pretty fricking legit, right? I know I can't complain!

So, here's to 2019!

I'm excited to see what new opportunities and challenges come our way in this new year. While we still have a few weeks yet to wrap up this year, I've been preparing for 2019 for a few weeks already...

💘

XOXO,

NAU 

Washington: Sunset at Picnic Point park

Coming from the Mojave desert and its unfriendly clime full of rattlesnakes, scorpions, mountain lions, Gila monsters, and seemingly endless inhospitable expanses of desiccated, arid land, Washington state is something of a mind-blower to nestle into. Not only does life profusely pop up from any crevice it can take a root in, as exemplified by the colorful variety of mosses that pop up upon startlingly varied surfaces or the curious caps of any variety of mushroom that makes its way to the surface from the mysterious depths below, or the dense groves of forest crawling from any uninhabited corner, but it thrives! Never before in my life, or Antho's, have we witnessed such a profligate procession of fungus! Or moss! It's so wet here, things gladly grow and grow. It's strange to be so inundated with moisture that you have ample to spare, after our lives being so deeply marked by the severe absence of this necessary fluid. I spent years, literally years, suffering from dry, cracking lips that would sometimes be so severe that the simple act of smiling or trying to speak would lead to bleeding. It was the pits, and no amount of chapstick seemed to help- hell, if anything, it leads to more intense shedding of my epidermis. No fun, believe you me. Two months in Washington's moist climate (say it with me, MOIST), the ambient humidity of the environment has healed what years and profuse amounts of money couldn't.  Maybe I should have just bought a humidifier... 

So, naturally, when we had more time to spare prior to nailing down our current jobs, we'd spend much of our free-time exploring. There's no shortage of places to adventure off to, with Seattle itself having over 6,000 acres of parks incorporated into it, and the outlying areas riddled with hiking trails and forests. We're pretty close to the Puget Sound in our new home, and we couldn't take root without going to see what all the fuss is about! Amusingly, during our very first walk along Picnic Point park's beach, a group of young stoners was loudly going about their teenaged shenanigans, and one of the youth's approached us to compliment Antho on his sweater and muse on the wonders of Washington. "Where else can you watch the sun rise over the Cascades and set over the Olympics?!"

Nowhere, man. Thanks for reminding us, dude.

And it's beautiful here. Crowded, yes, with roughly 7 million people living in the Seattle metropolitan area, but I strove to minimize the intrusion of other humans into my shots, so you get a vision of the park that isn't exactly 100% on point with the reality of the situation, but lets us enjoy the beauty of the scenery. After all, bright, sunny days are often a rarefied commodity here in the Pacific Northwest, where winters can seem to stretch interminably in their grey days, so you can't really fault the locals for wanting to get out and enjoy it while the loveliness lasts!

Picnic Point Park is surrounded by residential areas, too, despite being so close to the water. I can't begin to imagine how expensive the homes with the views are, and there are private beaches not far from this public place, but the park remains open to the public to enjoy and take in the view, for which we're grateful. There's a whole world of wonders out there to explore, and it's pretty cool to have a glimpse of some the more natural offerings from our own backyard.

There's even all sorts of new and unusual lifeforms to discover, like this sad jellyfish!

Nevada: Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam is a marvel of modern engineering roughly a half hour to forty-five-minute drive from the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, proper depending on traffic. This massive feat of cement and hydro-electric power provides the literal spark of electricity that keeps the city of Sin sparkling away and attracting visitors all-year-long, powered by the Colorado River and the Lake Mead man-made reservoir. Unfortunately for the residents of Las Vegas, like your's truly used to be, the water levels of the reservoir have been dwindling away over the last couple decades to leave a depressing ring around the entirety of the lake demonstrating how high the water levels used to be, versus their current levels. As a youngling, my family would drag me out to the lake pretty regularly for outings and Hoover Dam would get a visit at least once a decade to make sure I was aware of and, hopefully, appreciative, of it's importance to the valley. As an adult, I'm still grateful for the construction of Hoover Dam and the cheap energy it has provided the nearby cities for the majority of my life. Having a power plant in your own backyard is certainly a boon, though many newer residents of the valley might not be aware of just how close their energy creation is to their home. 

As is the case for most of us, the future is uncertain. There have been efforts to push water conservation in all the areas that benefit from the Colorado River's limited supply, but as the populations continue to grow in the drought-riddled areas there's going to be ever more scrapping over ever-more-scarce water supplies. It's not just the city of Las Vegas that benefits from the reservoir, after all, but much of Southern California, Utah and Arizona get a boost from this nearby supply. For many years it's been a cheap and efficient supply, but when the costs go up? I'm glad I'm not there to find out the result... I don't know that it's going to go full Mad-Max style up in the Mojave desert, but I can't say I'd be the least bit surprised if it did. 

Also, as a long-time resident of the area, it's kind of crap in my eyes how they've started charging for anything remotely resembling Dam-accessible parking. If you're willing to wait and possibly fight a bus-full of tourists, you might be able to find free parking at an outlying area, but otherwise, you're gonna have to shell out for the privilege of viewing a National Treasure. Bastards. Last I checked, you can't even go inside the Dam anymore due to fears of terrorism. 'Murica, home of the scared-shitless, am I right? Vegas is far more likely to be attacked by homegrown domestic terrorists, as clearly demonstrated by the terrible incident in 2017.  But I digress, being a center of power for a large region of the American Southwest probably makes it a consideration, which results in the over-the-top security measures being implemented. It is what it is, I'm afraid.