1) volunteer at an animal shelter
2) meet new friends
3) brush up on some foreign language skills
4) become more fit/active
First things first, I wanted to start some volunteering. When my parents took a brief hiatus from their previous professions, they both started spending time at the local hospital- once or twice a week they'd do a few hours of shifts pushing wheelchairs and helping nurses. It was a little strange to me to hear this, because for me volunteering was always a high school resume booster kind of thing, definitely not something I'd think of doing on my own time. They explained it as wanting to give a little back to society now that they had some free time. Because of that, I decided I wanted to look into volunteering for something I felt like was a good cause... aka animal shelters! Lo and behold, 5 miles away from where I live is a rabbit rescue! So before I even moved over, I had contacted the volunteer coordinator, filled out the necessary forms, and scheduled to volunteer for a few hours the day after I arrived. I gotta say, I have never scooped and cleaned so many litter boxes in two hours. This shelter houses about fifteen rabbits, all of which are saved from euthanization from local shelters. That results in a lot of hay and a lot of poop. The litter boxes must be changed every other day to keep the odor under control and keep the rabbits happy because they enjoy being cleanfreaks. Lucikly I'm used to it from years of every-other-day cleaning with Tommy so it's sort of a desensitized methodological process. But in between boxes, I'll spend some time petting each rabbit. Some are bonded (aka they've found a bunny friend to become besties with) and must be adopted together, some are humongously large (2-3x larger than Tommy was) but all are incredibly... rabbit. I got used to giving Tommy really intense head massages and ear rubdowns and it's nice to know that all rabbits enjoy them too. After volunteering again today, I can say that not all days of volunteering involve litter box cleanup. Today I got to make a rabbit salad! It involves three bunches of romaine lettuce, one bunch of green leaf lettuce, one bunch of cilantro, and one bunch of parsley. Tear it all up, toss it, and give one handful to each rabbit, one handful to every two guinea pigs, one small piece of romaine for each rat, and one tiny piece for each mouse. It's been pretty fun so far. The rescue shelter also sells all sort of supplies and food for rabbit owners at a lower price than normal pet stores and this helps fund the shelter, which I think is really cool. I wish there was something like that in VA when I was shopping for supplies for Tommy! I'll take some pictures of my favorites next time I go in to volunteer!
The second thing I wanted to do was really try to get out and make some friends. Being in a work-from-home occupation, there isn't really a water cooler gathering or a HH opportunity to go to after work hours. Instead, you really have to rely on going to church or meeting friends of friends or join Meetup. I chose the latter two. I've been meeting plenty of guys who are friends with my roommate and Christine's cousin, and who make every Sunday a funday with it being football season and it's been really fun watching a whole day's worth of games on two different tvs at the same time. We even have NFL Network in this house! But I had heard of friends using Meetup back in DC, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I've signed up for a few outdoorsy/active groups, a few Asian groups, and a few language practicing groups. Yesterday I attended my first Asian group meetup with Christine, at a bubble tea joint for just the ladies. It's funny because the organizer commented that whenever there's a mixer, not many ladies show up but when there's a "sorry, guys" event, then more than a dozen show up haha. I met a lot of very interesting backgrounds, some work in PR and you can really tell just by the way they carry themselves in their appearance and coax the conversation, some are fresh out of college looking for jobs, some have very strong personalities and work in professions that are primarily male. Meetup is like an Okcupid, except it's for interests, though I'm sure some people sign up to these things with a more personal intent. More updates to follow with other meetups!
Not much to say about the third goal- I wanted to brush up on my Chinese but that meetup doesn't really schedule too many events and I haven't quite found the time to bust out my old school books or try to watch any dramas or movies so it's still a work in progress.
Also, I am rather shockingly proud to say that I have joined a gym! It's really Christine's doing if I'm to give anybody credit. I joined a bouldering gym, which I do not do, but it's a gym that has a very spacious and well-equipped workout area and even offers numerous yoga and fitness classes. Plus, with me being carless at the moment, it just makes sense for me to join the same gym Christine's part of, especially if she's going to be climbing daily. Gives me a little push to think about being active daily as well. Thus far, I've had fun trying out the different yoga classes, and an ab workout, and I've been trying to become more proactive about rehabbing my right shoulder, which I dislocated once while playing flag football. Sports are another activity I'd like to pursue. Once the weather gets warm again, I'd like to join a VERY CASUAL league. There's actually a meetup called 30s flag football, specifically for those who don't want to be quite as physical as the reckless 20somethings which is right up my alley! I'm also considering bowling more regularly, and I've been playing ping pong like CRAZY because this house has a ping pong table! So far I've been lucky and have beat all of the boys who come on Sundays because of all of the rallying that Christine and I do during the rest of the six days of the week hehe.
And lastly, I'd like to end with an evaluation of the traffic of the Seattle area. It sucks. It's worse than DC. Here's a map of all of the interesting areas around Seattle:
Ignoring the annotations for the time being, what do you see? A freakishly large amount of blue, equaling a freakishly annoying amount of obstacle. I'm currently in Kirkland, as indicated by the red circle. The gym I frequent is indicated by the green arrow. Because of Lake Washington, I cannot take a direct hypotenuse route, but must attack it at a right angle. There are restaurants, cafes, bubble tea joints I like to go to within Seattle- places in Capitol Hill and University District. But route 520 (blue arrow) is a toll road. Being the cheap person that we are, we then drive all the way down to take I-90 which takes up a considerable amount of time. Other points of interest is Ballard (purple circle) which is a trendy yuppie area, Bothell (orange circle) which is where Christine's family lives, and Mercer Island (purple squiggly) which is where a bunch of rich people live, not many of which believe in immunizations. Redmond is to the right of where I live and houses Microsoft, and Amazon and Google are somewhere nearby too. Costco, Starbucks, Nintendo and T-mobile are somewhere in the mix too. All this just means that people live all over the place, drive all over the place, and make up tons of traffic because of the limited number of routes to get to these places. It drives me nuts. I love having all sort of route options but here, it's a headache! It makes me very glad that I have the flexibility to choose what time I want to leave the house to run errands or go to the gym, and what times of the day where I'm better off staying at home instead of spending an extra 40 minutes in traffic. It's time to invent flying cars!
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