Day 3 - Your Favorite Television Program

We don't have cable t.v. Our television is in the second bedroom that serves as Tracey's "man cave". Currently there are tools all over the couch in that room so we don't hang out in there much.

We use Netflix and have a Roku box hooked up to the television so we primarily watch t.v. shows that are on Instant Watch on Netflix. We watch a few shows that are still on through Surf the Channel. Right now, we are watching or have caught up on:

• Grey's Anatomy
• Sons of Anarchy
• Weeds
• Dexter
• Project Runway (this is mostly me)
• Breaking Bad
• Law and Order: SVU

I also like 'Top Chef' and am re-watching the 'Nip/Tuck' series. I also love 'Golden Girls', 'Six Feet Under', and 'Arrested Development'. Tracey tends to like shows like 'NCIS' and 'Oz'.

Around here.

Doll heads in someone's backyard

Dinner last night: mushroom alfredo with roasted summer squash and pearl onions from our CSA

Our morning coffee

Conversations

Silly snippets from conversations around our house. They're ridiculous but usually involve belly laughs that make my heart swell with love for this girl.

At the grocery store, when deciding which mixed fruit package we should get:

Me: This one. It has berries and melons.
Her: Perfect. I like berries more and you like melons more.
Me: I love melons. Cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelons. All melons. Especially pumpkin melons*.
Her: Pumpkin melons...?
Me: Think about it.
Her: HAHAHA.
Me: I made you say Pumpkin Melons out loud at the grocery store.

Last year after I made some cupcakes:

Me: If I were a cupcake, this is what I would look like.
Her: Yeah, it totally has JBF** frosting.

After I made a cake last night:

Me: Will you bring me a slice, please?
Her: *brings me a slice with a bite taken out of it*
Her: TAXES!

* I call her Pumpkin
** Just Been F*!#@ed

Day 2a - Your First Love, in great detail

My first love is the only other person I've loved besides Tracey.

My first love and I met when I was a few months shy of 19 and she had just turned 21.

My first love was my third girlfriend and I was her first.

My first love was half Filipino and taught me how to make her favorite Filipino dishes and how to say 'I love you' and 'My armpits are stinky' in Tagalog. My first love was 4 inches taller than me and I often had to stand on my tip-toes a bit to kiss her. My first love had an athletes body and wore a lot of knit caps over her shaggy black hair. She lived in jeans and hooded sweatshirts. She had a tattoo of a Japanese style tiger that took up most of her left calf.

My first love and I lived together in a one bedroom apartment in a building built in 1911. It was on a block between a park, a hospital where my mom works, a street that once literally divided the white section of Tacoma from the non-white section, and the most crime ridden neighborhood in Tacoma called Hilltop. We lived on the fourth floor and there were a million steps to our apartment. There were built-ins and pull-out beds and a clawfoot tub. The previous tenants did not disconnect their telephone service and her dad had an AOL account that he never used so we had dial-up forever.

My first love and I had two cats, both of which have been re-homed as she couldn't take them with her and I was unknowingly allergic.

My first love and I eventually moved up in the world and lived in a two bedroom fourplex in the nicer area of Tacoma while I went to school and we both worked. Her younger brother came over a lot and they would get stoned and play video games for hours.

My first love and I went to Mariner's games and Canada and Hawaii and river rafting for her birthday. She loved Dave Matthews Band and we would go see them at the Gorge every Memorial day weekend.

My first love would surprise me by slipping money into my wallet for me to get pedicures and draw me bubble baths in clawfoot tubs with lit candles on the bathroom vanity.

My first love stayed in Tacoma for six months after I moved for college. I wanted her to use that time to reflect on our relationship and decide if she wanted to move down with me.

My first love and I lived with my best friend from childhood and another friend for a year while I went to school and she worked for Nike.

My first love and I wanted different things in life. She loves adventures and spontaneity. I do, too, but not as much. My first love wanted to live in a condo with less upkeep and travel and never have kids. I want an old house filled with babies and a giant backyard that my wife mows. My first love was more passive than me and tried her best to avoid conflict. I want someone who will tell me to shut up when I'm being unreasonable but know they still love me.

My first love and I ended things somewhere between our sixth and seventh year as a couple. I put all of her things in the dining room until she finally found a new place to live. My first love and I tried to stay friends but we couldn't. Not full-time, anyway. My first love now lives with my childhood best friend which makes things slightly weird.

My first love showed me what I wanted in a partner, both good and bad. My first love showed me what I was good at as a partner and what things I needed to work on. My first love helped me understand what love and commitment and partnership are more than four or five less significant relationships ever could have.

Day 2 - Your Favorite Movie

Movies, like music, are something that I'm never really up-to-date on. A preview needs to really intrigue me to draw me to a theatre to watch one before it goes to video and, if I don't see it before then, I usually forget about.

We actually went and saw 'Inception' a few days ago and I had more to say about how expensive it was ($18.50 for soda and popcorn?!) than the movie itself. What can I say? I'm an old lady in a young woman's body.

My all-time favorite movies are:

• Mermaids
• Dazed and Confused
• Now and Then
• Planet Terror
• Kill Bill 1&2
• Best in Show
• Drop Dead Gorgeous
• High Fidelity

When given the option of movies to watch, I tend to gravitate towards documentaries. I will watch them about anything. Seriously. The last one we got from Netflix was about Dr. Bronner's Soap. I ended up not watching it for whatever reason but the fact that it even made it into our list says something, I think.

Day 1a- Introduce Yourself

I'm a visual person. I like to see pictures and drawings and charts and videos. So, I hope to include them in most of my posts.

This is me:


I'm 27. I was born in Kitsap County, WA in March. I have two sisters and a brother that I was raised with and a half-sister from my dad's second marriage. In the first thirteen years of my life I lived all over Washington state. Most of that time was spent in Eastern Washington with a brief stint in Vancouver. My mom re-married when I was 13.



We moved here when my mom re-married and it's where I spent most of my early teens. The only pertinent thing about this town now is that my parents and siblings still live there and it's where I met one of my best friends, Bonnie, when I was 13. I lived with my dad for a brief time just outside of Seattle. After I graduated from High School, I moved back to the 253 for five years and lived here:

This is the first place that captured my heart. Tacoma is like that weird kid in school that everyone picks on because it smells and isn't as cool as the popular kid which may be why I love it. It was the main port in Washington before Seattle's port was built and retains a strong blue-collar, working class population still. It's gritty in parts and beautiful in others. Like the Neko Case song says, "there are no hollow promises of a bright future." It's a refreshing break from the self-entitlement that people in Seattle and Portland have. That life should owe them something and that you need to have 38 Ethiopian cafes within a mile of your $400-square-foot condo. So, I lived here and worked in a coffee shop and went to community college.

After I finished my Associates Degree, I moved here to finish my BS:



I lived in a house in a nice neighborhood with three other girls and still worked at a coffee shop. I finished my BS in Community Development and concentrated on housing and economic development. After I graduated, I took classes for a year as a post-bacc and planned to go to graduate school for Urban and Regional Planning. I stopped going after realizing that I couldn't really afford to keep going and that planning requires a lot of 'after hours' to attend neighborhood association meetings, city council meetings, and was too politically geared. I didn't want to jump through a billion hoops to get affordable housing developed. So, now I still work at a coffee shop and am competing with the hundreds of other like-minded people in Portland to try and get a job doing something I care about.


In the meantime, I live with my sweet fiancee and a giant dog in a duplex and our friends live on the other side. We live in a neighborhood downwind of a Nabisco factory so the air smells like cookies in the evening. My favorite things in the world could be described as vintage or whimsical. Our house looks like this inside:



I make subversive cross-stitches and watch a lot of Netflix. I love Indian and Lebanese food and baking. I'm a type A personality so I don't like spur of the moment or unexpected situations and plan everything in my life three steps ahead. I also like to clean. A lot. I'm queer identified and femme in every sense of the word.

In Russian, Misha is a diminutive for the Russian male name Mikhail (Michael). Most bears appearing in Russian fairy tales have this name, because it is similar to the Russian word for Bear - Miedvied (Russian Медведь), of which the diminutive form is Mishka. I, however, am not Russian. :)

Day 1 - Your Favorite Song

I like music. I, however, do not live for music. I only listen to the radio in the car and I'm never up to speed with most new music. Living in a city full of hipsters that have seemed to make finding the most obscure bands a favorite past-time has made me a little bitter about even talking about music.

I listen to everything. I grew up listening to Fleetwood Mac and Heart with my mom and heavy metal with my dad. I liked punk and ska as a young teenager and electronic as an older teenager. I like classic rock, new wave, 90's alternative, bluegrass, mainstream hip-hop. I'm pretty nondiscriminatory with my musical selections and have no problem admitting I usually have bad taste in music.

That said, I don't have a favorite song. So here are some songs I like right now and some all-time favorites: